On the dilution of dance

One can’t invest more than eighteen years of effort into something without developing a bond with it, for good or ill, and I’ve recently discovered how much dance means to me, as well as how determined I am to preserve the values it holds for me. This realisation has come as a consequence of two separate incidents in the span of the same week: one is my attendance at this year’s Spring Forward Festival, and the other is a conversation I had with a theatre director.

These incidents confronted me with two polar opposite attitudes towards dance, neither of which I enjoyed being exposed to and which worried me about the future of the art form, as they both led me to the same conclusion: not a lot of people are interested in dance itself. Not only that, but the act of choreographing the movement that constitutes a dance is seen by many as the least important aspect of a dance performance, and in some cases, something which can be disposed of altogether.

The definition of what dance is has been a tricky subject for a long time, but it appears to me that the contemporary dance world is so unconcerned to define its own limits that it allows anything to call itself dance nowadays. Let’s take two of the best performances I saw at Spring Forward Festival as examples: Tom Cassani’s Iterations, an experimental magic show, and Aurora Bauzà and Pere Jou’s A BEGINNING #16161D, a dramatised choir concert. Both display incredible skill and artistry in their fields of practice (one being sleight of hand and the other the capacity of the human voice), yet neither of them are dance performances. Again, one is a magic show and the other a choir concert. This then begs the question of why they are part of a dance festival, as their inclusion hurts how dance is perceived as an art form by turning it into something which it is not. These are both excellent shows, but they belong to other branches of the performing arts, not to dance.

Some people get upset when I speak this way and accuse me of being hierarchical and elitist while ignoring the fact that a dance festival such as this one is hierarchical by its very nature. Anything that involves a highly selective process is creating a hierarchy by doing so. As for elitism, let me ask the following question: isn’t the purpose of dance institutions to discover and develop an elite of dancers and choreographers? If anyone can be a dancer or a choreographer, and anything can be considered dance, why do dance schools or choreographic competitions exist?

Let’s use another example from the festival, in this case, a performance that does include dance, to explore this further: Sylva Šafková’s Why things go wrong, a duet performed by Michal Heriban and Viktor Konvalinka. I felt it was preachy and self-indulgent, but at no point did I question why this was part of a dance festival. The piece was made out of several segments of choreographed steps and both dancers were highly skilled. It may have failed on artistic grounds, but unlike the two performances mentioned above, it absolutely qualifies as dance.

If you bought tickets to a basketball match and were presented with a football match instead, you’d be indignant, and rightly so. Dance should be no different, one should expect to see dance at a dance performance.

Having said that, I understand the need for dance to evolve. The theatre director I spoke to a few days after the festival believes Marius Petipa’s ballets to be the pinnacle of dance-making, an attitude which I consider to be equally detrimental towards the art form as a whole. Besides, I detected a hint of contempt towards dance in his highly opinionated thoughts, as upon asking him how he’d make the choreography of his planned Don Quixote production, he told me ‘Oh, I just hire a choreographer for that’, in a tone that implied that choreography was just part of the uncreative dirty work of making a large-scale ballet. This is a careless and ignorant attitude to have towards dance-making.

Making and performing movement is an important, perhaps the most important and creative part of making a dance performance, and I don’t think you can call yourself a choreographer if you neglect this or leave that work to others. Ideas, themes, and concepts are nothing without choreography, and we’d do well to remember that, as we risk the future of dance if we forget this simple truth.

Francesc Nello Deakin