I Don't Want Just a Mental Toehold on a Ballet; I Want a Full-Body Connection
In her New Yorker review, "The Newcomer," of Christopher Wheeldon at City Center, Joan Acocella focuses on how Wheeldon and his company Morphoses are determined to make their performances more accessible and comprehensible to audiences:
As each dance opened, its title was projected on a scrim in front of the stage. When the lights go down at a ballet performance, you often hear people asking each other frantically, "What's the next piece?" They spent intermission socializing and forgot to look at their programs. Wheeldon knows this, and is helping them out. In the evening's central section, a series of short dances, he made matters easier still by introducing each piece with a short film, maybe a minute long, of the cast rehearsing that number. The films (by William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, a.k.a. London's Ballet Boyz, who also danced during the season) were very good: sexy, sweaty. But their purpose, I believe, was to give the audience a toehold on the ballet before the curtain went up, and also to give them the pleasure, as they watched the piece, of recognizing steps. ("Oh, that's the passage they were working on in the film.") No art, not even opera, is more clad in snobbery than ballet. These little movies were an attack on that, and God bless them.
(Thanks to Anna McDonald for pointing out this New Yorker article.)
Christopher Wheeldon - Denver Post
I like this idea of giving the audience a mental "toehold on the ballet." But what I really want is a physical body-hold on the dance.
Two weeks ago I took a jazz class with Maurice Johnson at Joy of Motion in Washington, DC. I didn't know this at the time, but the routine he taught during the class was a snippet of a work that he was performing that weekend at Dance Place, which I happened to see.
As Acocella writes, there's a pleasure one gets from seeing steps/movement with which you're familiar during a performance. She's definitely right. But there are different levels of pleasure when it comes to seeing movement. At least in my case, I derive much more enjoyment seeing movement on stage with which my body is familiar than seeing movement on stage with which only my mind is familiar.
"Dancing in the Seats" - New York Times
Maybe this preference on my part is because I relate to dance more in a physical than mental manner. And also explains why I like this editorial so much in the New York Times "Dancing in the Seats" by Daniel J. Levitin. The author, a professor of psychology and music, explores the historical indivisibility of music and movement (many languages that are spoken today have a single word that means both music and dance). And he points out that from an evolutionary perspective the professionalization of performances which has led to a separation of performers and audience members is, essentially, unnatural. Our biological circuitry has not been trained over thousands of years not to move when we hear music that MOVES us. [via Amanda Abrams in DCDance Blog].
Full-Body Connections - A New Audience Development Strategy for Choreographers
This is what I'd really like dance companies to do during the weeks leading-up to a performance:
Take a section of your work--maybe a minute or so in length--and create a routine for students of different levels. Essentially, a choreographer would shoot a video of this routine in two versions (beginner and intermediate/advanced). This piece of choreography would be shot from different angles so that nothing is missed. And on the video the choreographer would talk users through the routine.
Then these videos would be posted to the web. Now anybody could download them. I could download the beginner routine and learn it on my own. Or a teacher could learn the routine and teach it to students in a dance class and promote the upcoming performance in the process. The dance company could even provide downloadable music files for use in dance classes - assuming they had the rights to do so.
It would also be helpful if the choreographer created an additional companion video that highlighted the basics of the technique that would be required to properly do the routine.
I have no idea how much of a market there would be for these types of videos. All I can say is that if you produce them and I can make sense of them, then I'm definitely going to your performance.
Posted by Doug Fox on October 30, 2007 10:25 AM
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OMG. Did Acocella think those films were GOOD? She must be slipping. They were super amature, which we pointed out in our review: http://countercritic.com/2007/10/24/more-morph-less-fluff/