January 12, 2000

what is dance?

Modern dance stretches the idea of dance. The performance has words or props to help it along. It's still about bodies in space. Not plot exactly like a traditional ballet. Not even standard forms. More like a painting or a multi-media installation with performers. It is performance art.

I discovered I liked modern dancing when I saw a Merce Cunningham show years ago at the Paramount. I was beguiled by the props, I think. Flowing pieces of material, maybe. Or contraptions which hid a person and made he or she something else moving, dance-like. I think. It's been a long time. More recently I've been seduced by the Johnson-Long Dance Company.

JLD takes it as far as it can go. Dance is sitting in a chair and reciting a prose/poem. Dance is building a wall of boxes.

We went to a dance marathon tonight. There is this huge modern dance competition. Worldwide thing. One stage of the contest is in various cities around the world. Austin is one. (LA and New York are the other U.S. places.) Two companies were from Austin who were selected. JLD and a group from Ballet Austin with a piece choreographed by Stephen Mills.

Stephen Mills piece was about AIDS. About sex=death. About death looming over sex. I believe. Actually he told me something about it being about AIDS. But I didn't need to be told. It was obvious but artful. JLD's piece was typcial for them and it, too, was about sex. The amusing side of sex, the undercurrent of sex. And building walls of boxes.

Another company was a group of rescued break dancers. Fortunately the music was less rap-like than most break dancing stuff and the dancing was very, very entertaining. Their piece was about competition and dominance. Actually, I think it was called 'Bounce' and was inspired by the stock market. Wait, maybe it was both!

I was dozy in the second half even though my friend Donna bought me a coke at the Intermission. (Interval to the Brits.) One company did a thing with a fan and a netting that was stunning. I think theirs was about sex. They used an aparatus which constrained a dancer. Stephen's piece did that, too. Not S&M in feel, though. Symbolic, more like.

One company had a very tall dancer, a man. They also had a small child in the group. Or else they just couldn't get a babysitter. They had a picnic on stage with watermelon. Which sat the stage for the group that used apples as props.

OK, I'm not a dance critic. But I play one on the Internet.

"The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite."

Havelock Ellis