Fame or Famine

The general consensus seems to be that DanceWar is a bust. Swan Lake Samba Girl put it this way

“…I’ve never in my life seen more people with less dance training seeking to become “stars.” They sang their hearts out and wiggled their butts and seemed in all honesty to have no clue that ass wiggling did not constitute dance…and so looked like monkeys.”

I don’t know that I’d go that far – again, this is a show not about dancers but about what kind of team Bruno and Carrie can craft. But I actually came to the review via Natalia of the “Shimmyblog“, and she mentioned another critique that, while accurate for the show, leads into a dangerous stereotype:

“I will just say this point blank: If you are dancing to music, but your movement ignores the music – then go home and work on your musicality. It does not matter how perfect your technique is if you can’t figure out how to fit that movement to your music. And don’t even try to say, “that’s the choreographer’s job” Sure it is, but it’s your job too. “

I’m sorry, but coming from a Modern dance background and training – well, first of all, most of our training was not to music. I recall how uncomfortable I was after two years of Modern dance training to come to a jazz class where everything was right-on-the-beat .

My comp teacher, Jin-Wen Yu, taught me this better than anyone. He had the class sit down and told us he was going to be doing a solo for us. He then stood in the center of the room, full of composure and presence (you have to see this man, if you get the chance, just to feel him on the stage) and signaled for the music to begin.

A guitar started wah-wahing, and a funky little drum beat started, and the class started giggling – it was the BeeGees singing “Stayin’ Alive”. Not what you’d expect a world-class dancer to use in his modern dance composition class.

Then he started to move. I recognized what he was doing right away, because I was also taking an early morning T’ai Chi class from him – he was doing the Yang short form. And the contrast of the slow, deliberate motion to the music was beautiful.  What followed was some very difficult training getting us to ignore the music, no matter how steady or driving the beat, or how to impose our own rhythm on long, sustained John-Cage-type music.

Which is the best argument of all, I think. Merce Cunningham was the king of just sticking dance to whatever music – or noise, even – that was happening, enjoying the happy coincidences that occur, or that are imposed by the audience. The thing is, we are conditioned to want to see those kinds of match-ups, and will put them in whether they are there or not.

Which may be why modern dance isn’t as popular as, say, DanceWar. Because it takes a little more work to appreciate what’s going on, to really find the beauty in dissonant movement. I don’t want to make a value judgement on it – hey, I love rhythmic dancing as much as the next guy.

But just because something doesn’t fit into convention…well, that may be a good thing. It’s part of why I was so disappointed that they let Quandrell go. It’s how people grow. Watching another dance video, I heard a critic talk about how Baryshnikov had added all sorts of movements to the ballet canon that hadn’t existed before, and now all the male ballet dancers did them as if they were no big thing. “But that’s not what makes Misha great,” he added. “What makes him great is that he can stand on the stage doing nothing – and you can’t take your eyes off of him.”

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