November 5, 2007

Responding to "Your Audience"

I received some great responses to my rather angry rant on Halloween: "Your Audience, Love 'em or Hate 'em?," in which I complained about feeling contempt from experimental dance artists towards their audiences.

Levi Gonzalez, a brave soul from the NYC dance scene provided a wonderful counter-comment to my post which challenged me to clarify my thoughts and be more specific about my problems. Now I can condense it to basically this: I don't feel like experimental artists think about communication enough.

I used to be active in the NYC experimental dance scene as a performer and choreographer. In the past couple of years I have changed course to become a producer and curator of dance for the camera. Now that I've gained a bit of distance from the scene, I'm seeing it from the outside and having some different thoughts about experimentalism. Before, when making work, I was more focused on what I was not doing (ie participating in an oppressive, capitalistic, populist culture) rather than what I was doing: performing for an audience and having an exchange with them. I didn't think about how my work may have been alienating my audience because it never occurred to me to investigate who they were and what they were bringing to the experience. Despite the many exceptions in the dance community, I do think that there is something about experimental art scenes that foster a kind of elitism and snobbery. My personal definition of an experimental art scene is a group of artists who live on the outer edges of society and share similar aesthetic and creative ideas that mainly revolve around critiquing and counterbalancing mainstream culture.  One aspect of mainstream culture is the "mass audience." As part of the experimental dance scene in New York I used to feel that to cater to any audience beyond our scene would be seen as a sign of selling out or dumbing down the work. In any case, the work's status as "experimental" would be put into question. This could have just been me being oversensitive, and trying to fit in. But now as an audience member I often feel like if I didn't know this scene or come from it, I would feel really out of place. I get the sense mostly from younger, less mature artists, that they want me to come to them all the way. There is very little interplay or reciprocation from the performers towards their audience. Again, this is getting very general, and I hate to name names in such a small, fragile community. Perhaps it would be better to illustrate an example of what I considered to be a good artist/audience exchange that Levi happened to be a performer in:

 In John Jasperse's recent piece at BAM, "Misuse liable to prosecution" he addressed the audience directly right at the beginning through a monologue of economic statistics that laid the groundwork for the rest of the dance. There was nothing self-indulgent about it. We learned what the piece was about up-front, and then the abstract dance vignettes that followed could be fit into a context. Even though the piece was specifically about the terrible economic state of experimental modern dance, he did not put a guilt trip on the audience. In fact his audience was mostly comprised of members of this self-same community. He may have made us feel uncomfortable, but it was not to attack us and twist the knife, rather it was to raise awareness and show a way to empowerment. As an audience member I really appreciated this work because it voiced the pain and difficulties of being an experimental dance artist in a way that all people could relate to. The work was human.

Levi raised a great point in his comment that illuminates another potential pitfall experimental artists run into:

'Also, ironically, one could argue that the way artists make a name for themselves and the 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.'

This is the dark side of marketing that we must also remain aware of. I believe there are many other ways of raising ourselves and our community up without selling out or diluting our message. For me, I had the realization that I must go out towards my audience and invite them in, they will not find me on their own. To do this I have embraced the camera to create and propagate dance in a mediatized form able to be distributed in many ways. I have made a cable access tv show, produced screenings and festivals, and now this blog on the internet. There are many other examples though: Jill Sigman has done it through secret message campaigns with egg shells and voicemail messages on little calling cards distributed throughout the city. Others like fellow Great Dance blogger Tom Pearson with Third Rail Projects perform in alternative sites out-side the theatre. These may seem like major undertakings, but the same results can be achieved through even subtler processes. 

All experimental artists really need to do is think of their work as a form of communication in addition to being an artistic exploration. This transmission of messages doesn't start or end at the moment of the performative act, it is an ongoing process of exchange with an audience that will take many forms along the way and ultimately shape and change both parties. With a little more consciousness about who we are performing to, we may be able to give the Mark Morris' and Twyla Tharp's of the world a run for their money and raise the profile of our community to be powerful movers in the culture at large.

For some other recent discussions about this topic see Lisa Traiger's post: What's Wrong With Modern Dance, and Daniel Burkholder's post: snickered.

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse on November 5, 2007 12:14 AM

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