Thursday, August 26, 2010

Anarchic Choreography


Michael Clark at Tate Modern.

I thought dance entailed "dancers" and a larger range of motion.... it looks to me like they're lying down on a massive communal yoga mat. Isn't that kind of like playing the piano with one finger while rolling around in someone else's sweaty bacteria?

Well, at least they'll have washboard abs by the end of this, if not unidentifiable skin rashes.


I came across a great response in a discussion pertaining to this article in the The Guardian.

Sounds kind of cool doesn't it? What a reputation to have - "anarchic choreographer" - wow, how trendy! In a few years, if anarchic choreography takes off, there will be undergraduate degrees in 'anarchic choreography' - throwing out all those stale old rules of choreography - maan. In fact, with time, anything that might resemble old fashioned 'dance'. Over time, in order to earn the reputation 'anarchic choreographer', choreographers will have to become more and more 'anarchic', discarding more and more of the things that ever made dance popular. They'll lose public support somewhere down the road of course, but it won't matter, because before too long, anarchic choreographers will no longer be judged according to the standards of old, conservative, stuckist, choreographers. Anarchic Choreography will be self-referrential, self-regarding, self-contained and self-justifying in terms of its anarchic forward-lookingness; they'll claim that there's great value in avant-garde, (controlled / contained) anarchy to the advancement of society. And anarchic choreographers will keep pushing and pushing those assumed benefits in the belief that one day, everyone will have forgotten what dance used to be about, and instead, appreciate new, 'anarchic' dance.

Hell, it might even decide that that's not anarchic enough and in order to be truly anarchic, choreographers will have to vow to destroy dance itself!

There'll be a band of people yelling "but this isn't dance is it?" Who will be sneered at by the media, the dancy - arty intelligencia and the generations of 5,000 or more "BA(hons) Anarchic Choreography" students who graduate each year from formerly hallowed places of learning to dance and to choreograph dance moves.

Sound like a familiar story? :-)

Lee Woods, www.leewoods.com


Well said.

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