November 28, 2006

Explaining the Decline of Dance in America

Update: Wall Street Journal now has free link to Terry Teachout's full article, which I quote below. Thanks once again to Apollinaire Scherr.

Terry Teachout, drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, wrote a column this past weekend, "Ballet? Never Heard of It: The decline and near-disappearance of dance in America." (This column is in the November 25-26, 2006 weekend edition on page P16. You can read this column online, but you have to be a paid subscriber to The Wall Street Journal to access it.)

Against the backdrop of the recent crowning of Emmitt Smith as this season's winner of ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" as thirty-two million Americans looked on, Teachout highlights a number of trends and developments that have contributed to dwindling audiences for concert dance performances.

"Things were different in the '60s and '70s, when Edward Villella would fly through the air on "The Ed Sullivan Show" one week and swap one-liners with Tony Randall on "The Odd Couple" the next. Those were the days of the "dance boom," the heady interlude when America was dance-crazy. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Jerome Robbins, Broadway's hottest musical-comedy director, made popular ballets like "Dances at a Gathering" on the side. Even George Balanchine was a celebrity, thanks in part to "Dance in America," the PBS series that introduced a generation of TV viewers to ballet and modern dance."

Teachout highlights data from the "2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts," which is published every decade by the National Endowment for the Arts, to show how interest in dance has diminished:

"...the percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 35 who attended one or more ballet performances a year fell from 5.0% in 1992 to 3.1% in 2002."

(PDF version of the full 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and the PDF version of the summary.)

I looked through the "2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts," and I did not find a side-by-side breakdown by age for attendance for both 1992 and 2002. Also, age groups are broken down as follows: "18-24," "25-34" and upwards. So I'm not sure where Teachout found the data for decreasing ballet attendance for 18-35 year-olds I quoted above.

Also, by quoting just the numbers for ballet, he makes the decline in dance audiences look worse than it actually is. This survey also includes data for other types of dances.

In a table titled, "U.S. Adults Participating in the Arts at Least Once in the Past 12 Months," 4.7% of survey respondents said that in 1992 they attended a ballet performance. This percent declined to 3.9% in 2002. The number of adults attending a ballet performance was 8.7 million in 1992 and 8.0 million in 2002. (Something appears not right about these numbers because a decline to 3.9% would result in about 7.2 million adults attending ballet and not 8.0 million as the table indicates. So I have to go back to the report and see where these numbers come from.)

While still showing a decline, the numbers for "Other dance" (dance other than ballet, including modern, folk and tap) are higher. 7.1 % of survey respondents said that in 1992 they attended an "Other dance" performance. This percent declines to 6.3 in 2002. The number of adults attending an "Other dance" performance was 13.2 million in 1992 and 12.1 million in 2002.

To digress, I was looking at one of the tables in this survey report titled "U.S Adults Performing or Creating Art at Least Once in Past 12 Months." Essentially, to what extent survey respondents are actively involved in the creation of art. In 1992, 8.1% of respondents said they were actively engaged with "Other dance" in a creative manner. This number then dropped to just 4.2% in 2002. The actual numbers are 15 million people in 1992 and 8.6 million in 2002. That's a stunning drop that does not seem possible.

Teachout then offers three generally-held theories for why dance is declining in popularity:

"- Not only has dance vanished from American TV, but newspapers and magazines have cut back on dance-related news stories and reviews.

- The quality of new choreography has fallen off significantly.

-"Swan Lake"-style classical ballet with it tutus and Tchaikovsky, is "irrelevant" to today's young people."

These theories, to a greater or lesser extent should all be taken seriously, Teachout says. But a more fundamental reason for the decline in dance's popularity may have deeper causes:

"Of the 120 American dance companies that received grants from the NEA in 1986, 50% are no longer in existence, among them such noted ensembles as Alwin Nikolais Dance Company, Chicago City Ballet, the Cleveland Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Feld Ballet, the Oakland Ballet Company and Twyla Tharp Dance. Most of America's major museums and symphony orchestras, by contrast, have been in business for roughly a century--but only three American ballet companies, American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, were founded prior to 1950."

In addition, another "problem is that classical dance is a comparatively young art form that lacks a universally recognized canon of crowd-pleasing classics....outside of "Swan Lake," "The Nutcracker," "Sleeping Beauty," "Giselle" and "Romeo and Juliet," there are no "classic" dances... Most of the greatest ballets and modern dances were made in the second half of the 20th century, and none is known by name to more than a comparatively small number of committed dance buffs."

Teachout concludes:

"That's why the dance boom went bust. No classics, no stars, only a handful of long-lived institutions...so why take a chance on dance? And there in lies the challenge of reviving dance in America: Anyone who seeks to launch a new company, or revitalize an old one, must start by figuring out how to make large numbers of Americans want to see something about which they no longer know anything--save Emmitt Smith does it."

Good food for thought. Terry Teachout also has a blog About Last Night on ArtsJournal.

Thanks to Apollinaire Scherr for making her blog readers aware of Terry Teachout's article.

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