Great post Anna. I know if dance modern dance is to have a positive presence in society, we have to understand our audiences and meet them.

This is something that has baffled me when hearing experimental artists talk about their art...

Question: "what was your intent in making this piece?"
Answer 1: "My intent was to confront and challenge my audience, so I chose a controversial subject."
Answer 2: "I wanted to make a statement about [controversial subject] - The final result is challenging and confrontational."

Answer number 2 makes sense to me. I want to see art that seeks to explore difficult ideas and makes people think.

Unfortunately, I've read a lot more artists basically express answer number 1, which I find tiresome and self-absorbed. Like, "I want to shock people so they'll all talk about me!"

I think this is an important discussion but I find it hard to relate when people make such broad generalizations about work. I actually find a great breadth and variety of approach in the work of contemporary NYC artists, and that it often directly reflects not so much a desire to shock or outrage as it does the personality of the maker. I think its healthy for audiences to have opinions about what kind of work they find difficult to the point of self-indulgent. I know I have felt that way myself about work. Yet I don't see a general tendency in NYC work to make audiences suffer.

Something I see a lot of is a desire for artists making performance work to slow down time and activity, and to minimize the amount of action or "virtuosity" on display. This to me is a reaction to a culture that is aggressively marketed and sensationalized and packaged. I sense a consciousness of dance makers trying to relearn themselves and provide an opportunity for us to experience sensation in detail, in the small, the durational, the non-spectacular. Sometimes this can be boring but I find work that really runs the gamut from aggressive to soft to lazy to incredibly complex and resonant in this vein.

Also, ironically, one could argue that the way artists make a name for themselves and they way they tend to be marketed in the contemporary scene is if they are in fact, "shocking" "transgressive" and "controversial". As an artist myself I feel pressure from the marketing point of view to be provocative and polarizing. It sells. What I think is lacking from both the artist side and the marketing/presentation side is an idea of sustainibility in the work and the career of the artist, though I do see that starting to be addressed which is heartening.

Thanks for the post...

Levi,

Thanks for your response, and as an aside, I just saw your performance in John Jasperse's "Misuse liable to prosecution" last night at BAM, and you were wonderful as always. Great piece, and so apropos to this post!

I agree that I was too vague and general here, so I will try to clarify and specify my thoughts better in a follow-up post in the next day or two.

Oh hi Anna -- I just read your comment on Daniel's post (which I commented on) and re-read this post, which now has all the more resonance to me since I went to a performance of experimental artist John Jasperse's new work, wrote what I consider to be a fairly positive review, got several comments by balletomanes saying that the work sounded awful, and then got a rather rude but extremely vague comment by someone I don't know who wouldn't leave me their name and whom I'm assuming is either a big fan of Jasperse, associated with him, or an experimental artist him/herself. I didn't post the comment which was simply, "How is this a review?" because I found it a personalized insult suggesting I was too stupid to write a real review without specifying which of my viewpoints exactly the person disagreed with and why. I worked really hard on that review, I really struggled to find meaning in what Jasperse did, and by blogging about it I gave him a form of publicity (however minor). This person, whoever it was, didn't recognize that at all but just lashed out against me. I hate to say it, but it made me never want to see an experimental dance performance again. Of course now I'm over it, and I will see more experimental work and I know not to automatically associate this person with Jasperse himself, but now I definitely see what you mean about experimental artists and / or their fans (who are often other experimental artists) condescending to their audience and just lashing out if they don't get it without trying to explain to them what they were supposed to get! Anyway, sorry to be so long-winded. Thank you for this post!

Hi Tonya,

I just read your excellent post about the Jasperse piece. I also wrote about this piece today in my follow-up post to this article: Responding to "Your Audience". I think his piece was great at communicating how it feels to live and work in the experimental dance community in New York. I love the way he commented on the economy and forced the audience to deal with it, but it didn't feel like he was attacking us and saying "oh woe is me." Instead he grappled with it himself, and even gave nods to his own privileges which include having a rent controlled apartment in the Village for $500/month and a season at BAM Next Wave, both of which are pretty remarkable assets!