PASSION IN THE DANCE There has been a discussion about passion and dance recently. Felicia Elias asked me to comment on another blog about the increasing trend towards passionless dancing, inspired by Emmas wonderful blog on issue....and here was my reply: People dance a bit more in the style they see others dance and there WAS a pretty homogenous technically/appearance focused example that toured claiming to be what the dance was about ... that DID influence a lot of people getting into the field and perpetuating that. (This is definitely not a dis to them! Very successful model!) But I truly dont believe this is a new trend at all, and I definitely remember it existing back before the last decade. There have always been dancers that excelled in different areas and had success excelling in different areas. There are three factors that go into a pleasing performance: appearance, technical skill, and audience ability. But a dancer does not have to have all three to excel (Ive written about this before but I dont have access to the full explanation from my phone). Audience ability includes emotional expressiveness. And you really only have to have a strong ability in one factor, a medium ability in two, or a decent amount of all three to be successful. During the boom of pretty/tech, what got created/valued? Exceedingly pretty and exceedingly technical dancers. They become teachers and create more of themselves. The result somewhat unbalances what you see in an average show -- like when a preponderance of dancers decided they didnt have to play cymbals in the past and taught several generations of dancers without addressing them. But there are still a ton of teachers out there that stress expressiveness or exhibit it themselves and inspire people to reach for expressiveness. We just have to watch for that and wait out the sea change while the values even out again. Im finding it cool that this is finally coming into peoples awareness. And that that means the emphasis will start to go back the other way and we will see less same same again...Ive actually already noticed it. A generation of new dancers suddenly finding the emotional content of music instead of being just pretty and technical. But they are still in the minority. Yet when they join the next generation of teachers that will affect the balance again. It helps to have a really long history in the field to see this as a cycle and not an end game. Wuff. That was a long post by phone. Thanks for your patience.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 16:36:29 +0000
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