November 30, 2006

Natalia of Bellydance: Experiences on the "Decline of Dance"

In my Tuesday post, "Explaining the Decline of Dance in America," I wrote about Terry Teachout's weekend column in the Wall Street Journal, "Ballet? Never Heard of It: The decline and near-disappearance of dance in America."

Natalia of the Bellydance: Experiences blog wrote a comment in response to my post and also wrote a follow-up blog post.

Natalia takes issue with Terry Teachout's premise that all dance is in decline just because ballet audiences are dwindling:

"Seriously, people are not uninterested in dance. People are tuning in by the millions to see people dance. They're just not tuning in by the millions to watch ballet. I mean, do you suppose French-style chefs are sitting around turning up their noses because most people want to eat Italian, Thai, Mexican, African and every other kind of food? Well, ok, they probably are. But could you imagine them claiming that because Mexican food is becoming the most popular in the US, people have lost their interest in food? Would you take them seriously? There are thousands of fine dining restaurants making money hand over fist, but now they cover the whole spectrum of styles and ethnicities of food.

"People love dance and creative movement, but there is a finite amount of interest out there, and ballet isn't the only game in town anymore. All this complaining isn't about people losing interest, it's about ballet losing market share. Maybe we can put dance critics, General Motors, and Tab soda in a corner together to commiserate."

Natalia makes a good point: The sub-title of Teachout's article is "The decline and near-disappearance of dance in America." If ballet and modern were the only types of dance in the US, then the sub-title would make sense. But clearly millions of Americans enjoy participating (as audience members, TV viewers and dancers) in many types of dance. At the same time, Teachout does refer to dance as one of the "lively arts" and he is focused on the decline of concert dance (ballet and modern primarily) in America, although, I believe, he could have made this distinction much more clearly.

In addition, by viewing the TV-ratings success of "Dancing With the Stars" in such bleak terms, Teachout misses an opportunity to consider why 32 million people watched this reality dance program in the first place. Concert dance needs to explore new ways to reach and educate larger audiences, which is one of Teachout's major points in his article.

So my starting question would be, how would one go about creating, say, a modern dance reality program for TV (probably a cable channel such as Bravo) Would you create teams of choreographers and dancers who were given a new challenge every week? At the end of each program, one of the dance teams, like all other reality shows, might be eliminated from the contest. Most of this TV show might be devoted to how a piece of choreography comes to life and viewers could watch how a choreographer and dancers work together to turn an idea into a finished dance.

There are many possibilities to explore along these lines. But, one thing is for sure, "Dancing With the Stars" is not the enemy. As Natalia writes, "People love dance and creative movement..." So, from the perspective of the ballet and modern dance community, the question is how do you tap into this creative energy and the love of movement in order to enlarge the audience for concert dance?

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