Gray at Fame or Famine wrote a post today discussing Dance War, and in that context commenting on my idea that dancers need to fit their dance to the music. He then described studying modern dance, and learning to "ignore the music" - I had a very strong response to this. I wrote comment after comment defending dancing to music, and deleted every one of them :) For me, the idea of ignoring the music feels fundamentally in opposition to my experience of dancing. what I finally ended up writing was much less upset-sounding than where I started.
So, of course, since my first response was so emotional, so I had to stop and think more objectively about what was driving my emotion. On the drive home from a meeting tonight, I realized what made me feel that way.
The most sublime dancing I have ever seen has all had one thing in common: Improvisational dancing to live music where the dancer and the musician interact and play off of each other. This is certainly one of the things that made me fall so thoroughly in love with bellydance... but also, I have seen flamenco that has made me cry - performed by just a dancer and a lone guitarist. And I remember once going to a Brazilian club to see Samba dancers and a live band, and was just blown away by the sheer energy and life force filling the room.
So in that context having the dancer ignore the music? It completely removes even the suggestion of that dancer-musician synergy. Even when the dancer is dancing to recorded music, a really great dancer can evoke at least a suggestion of that connection. But to purposely remove it? for me that removes exactly the most magical part of watching dance for me.
What it really underlines for me is that dance is intensely personal. That my experience of dance and Gray's are fundamentally different. I'm even willing to venture that he and I could go to the same performance, and come out seemingly have watched two completely different things.
There has been so much discussion in the dance blogosphere about how to increase the attendance at dance performances and get more attention and money directed towards dance. I am starting to wonder if one thing that has been overlooked in this discussion is the huge breadth of the ways people experience dance, and that you can't make the assumption that what you take away from a performance is the same thing that other people will. In that respect, the best way to get audiences excited to to figure out what touches *them* about dance, then make sure each potential audience member is made aware of shows that mesh with the things that turn them on.
I don't know... I'll have to think about this some more.
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