The Breakdown of Communication

Modern dance has forgotten about its audience

Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash

A comment on last week’s essay brought up an important point: the lack of dance education in schools. This lack is one of the most glaring symptoms of the way dance is devalued compared to other art forms. Public school arts curriculums include music, visual art, and theater. When I was homeschooling, we did composer studies and picture studies, read poetry and Shakespeare. But dance, by and large, seems to be relegated to the sidelines as a completely optional extracurricular activity.

Even if not everyone needs to learn to dance (although I would argue it could do nothing but good), there is another kind of education that is even more neglected: teaching people how to watch and appreciate dance.

I gave a presentation called “How to Watch Dance” this past autumn to a room full of intellectuals, people who are mostly not artists themselves but have a great appreciation for the arts as a whole. I gave this presentation because I have observed that even thoughtful, intelligent people, who believe art is important, usually feel incompetent to interpret or enjoy dance. Either they a) don’t think it is important as an art form to begin with, and therefore have never taken the time, or b) have not ever been presented with resources to understanding dance in the same way they would seek to understand, say, classical music or visual art. More often than not, the general mood in these conversations seems to be, “I wish I could, but I just don’t know how.”

And no wonder — I did a Google search as I began to create my presentation, hoping to build my ideas from someone who had already thought about this. And there really is not much out there.¹

Which I guess explains the problem.

This is, I think, one of the keys to giving dance a better cultural platform: educating people who are not themselves dancers to watch, understand, and appreciate it.

Modern Dance’s Self-Indulgence

There are probably many reasons why this is not happening in the robust way that it could. But within the realm of modern dance² in particular, there is something worrisome at the core of its ethos that has contributed greatly to the lack. What I am about to describe is, I believe, the key to why every average joe dislikes modern dance and why it tends to be stereotyped and ridiculed in society at large.³

This core issue is the complete neglect of the audience as an essential factor in the creative process.

Much of modern dance is what I would describe as self-indulgent, concerned only with the personal expression of the artist. The artist’s ‘self’ is the highest good, their experience of their work the paramount thing. What matters above all is that it is ‘authentic’ to them, and if someone doesn’t like it, it ‘just wasn’t made for them’. The artist’s subjective experience, and their freedom to express that experience, is the only standard.⁴

But wait, I can hear everyone asking. Isn’t the artist’s personal expression the whole point of art?

I want to humbly submit to you that maybe it isn’t — or at least that it isn’t enough, on its own.

The Artist-Audience Exchange

There may be some differences here between performing art and other forms, but I believe that as a whole, good art is communicative. Not, I hasten to add, that it necessarily communicates a specific moral or message. This is a recipe for disaster and is where the church has gone wrong for so many years. But good art will spark something in its audience — whether an idea, a sensory sensation, a spiritual experience, simple enjoyment, or some combination of these. What the artist is communicating may not be simple; you might not be able to write it in a sentence. But if all the audience experiences is a blank stare, something has gone wrong.

The problem is, modern dance does not seem to understand this. The general public mocks it or expresses their confusion or disgust, and those who make modern dance shrug and turn back to each other and continue their self-indulgence, never once asking if this lack of popularity should be telling them something.

This breakdown of communication is especially infuriating because dance is a performance-based art. The audience is inherent to its very being — the finished product only exists while the audience is present. To be working in an art form where the finished product is meant to be presented to a live audience, but to say through either word or action that you do not care about the audience’s experience, is to fail to use your medium well.

Of course there is a balance here. The question of who the artist makes art for is a big one and could be hotly debated. And to some extent, the artist has to be making their art for their own fulfillment, because that is where the joy and passion of creation come from. But if the answer is only, ever, that you are making the art for yourself, why even bother putting it onstage?

I do not mean pandering to or coddling an audience, making dance that is inauthentic and poor quality because it is enslaved to their whims. This is where we return to the idea of education. There is a two-way exchange that needs to take place when art communicates at its best, and the key to this exchange is the very education that is lacking from our cultural milieu.

The exchange is this: the choreographer has a responsibility to put something before the audience that they can make sense of using the tools they have been given, and the audience has a responsibility to learn and use those tools to engage with the work.

This seems to be the understood process with genres like visual art, classical music, and poetry (at least in their historic and classical forms). There is an understanding that they are sophisticated art forms that contain objective qualities, and it takes the development of skill and taste to understand them at the deepest level. There is also a sense that, if you don’t like one of these forms, it might be a problem with you, and not with the form; that there is inherent worthiness and beauty within them and it is the job of the human to develop tastes in accord with that beauty and worthiness.

So the idea of educating a dance audience assumes that dance is like this as well, that it is an art form that is sophisticated and complex, and that there is a level of objectivity to what is intended and communicated. There are two parts to that statement: the choreographer has to make dance that is in fact sophisticated, complex, and communicating with a level of objectivity, and then the audience has to be taught (or teach themselves!) how to appreciate and understand the work.

Once again we are scratching the surface of a much larger conversation about objectivity and subjectivity, and the very idea that there could be something objective in artistic interpretation is greatly under attack in our postmodern era. Modern dance has been on the front lines of the subjective approach, which is probably the underlying cause of much of what I’ve discussed thus far. If meaning is irrelevant in the first place, then what you are communicating to an audience doesn’t matter. There is nothing for them to learn — they simply sit, watch, take in a first impression, interpret it however they want, and that is where it ends.

A Caveat

Once again a careful balance is required. Subjectivity in art is not always a bad thing. The goal of audience education, for any form of art, is NOT to explain away or dissect everything about the piece of art to the point where the wholeness of its beauty is lost.

The method of education matters. There is an interplay that takes place in the best art of every kind, an interplay of form and freedom, meaning and mystery. The point of art education is not to remove the freedom and mystery or impose a moral on every work. I think the best art education simply provides touchstones, entry points, a way for the audience to develop their eye, so that in seeing the details they can ultimately see the whole better.

If dance education succeeds in reducing the whole endeavor to a mechanized “if this…it means that” scenario, it too has failed.

Mechanization and subjectivity are the twin poles of modernity, swinging to either end of the scale. And both of them are the death of art.

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So what is the alternative? What would a healthy artist-audience relationship look like within the realm of dance? And how do we get average people interested in modern dance, in particular?

What people need, more than anything, is an understanding that dance is a sophisticated art form and also that they are not stupid if they don’t understand it right away. Rather than being written off by the artists, they need to be given permission to learn, shown the entry points, and helped to see the beauty of what dance can do.

This process then creates a mutual trust: the audience trusts that the artist is taking care to communicate well, and the artist trusts that the audience will engage in their work with intelligence and integrity. The audience is equipped to say that they like or dislike specific pieces and why, rather than dismissing an entire art form as being beyond them.

And dance becomes more than entertainment. It becomes another way of accessing the transcendent, a place where people know they will find glimpses of what is good and true and beautiful because they know how to look for it.

In the coming weeks I am going to adapt my afore-mentioned presentation into a series of essays, covering some entry points for understanding dance if you are a beginner in the audience. I hope it will be helpful. It will be a multi-part series, so please consider subscribing if you are interested so that you can see when I publish each installment!

1. If anyone knows of substantive work that exists already on this topic, please let me know!

2. The term “modern dance” encompasses anything that people call “modern” or “contemporary”. The terms are confusingly interchangeable and yet often mean slightly different things. I am using them interchangeably for now, to talk about the whole broad category.

3. One of my ongoing questions is whether what I am about to discuss was inherent in the foundations of historic modern dance, or whether it has developed over time. I plan to do more research on that. This essay is limited to my own observations about what modern dance is today.

4. I see this more often in collegiate modern dance and those coming out of academia, or in small companies. I think once you are trying to keep a large professional company afloat, you become a little more concerned about whether your audience likes what you are doing. Which of course then raises a whole other set of questions about profit and entertainment that we will have to talk about another time.