The Intimate, Unified Universe of Dance
By JOHN ROCKWELL

WE live in tribal times. Everywhere we look, proud unities have splintered into warring clans. What's true in the Middle East or in the once collegial United States Senate seems true in the arts as well. Broadway babies are unlikely to pay much heed to Off Off Broadway experiments. Opera maniacs pay little attention to chamber music, let alone seriously unlistenable contemporary music, let alone hip-hop

And so it might seem in dance. There are ballet fans who disdain modern dance as dated or amateurish. Loft-dance devotees who regard ballet as impossibly mannered. Those who think that Rennie Harris, the translator of hip-hop dance for the stage, has sold out.

But there are some of us - indiscriminate omnivores, perhaps - who peer obsessively beyond boundaries. And for me, as I prepare to take over as chief dance critic, it seems time to affirm the unity of dance. Not just as wide-eyed optimism but as a true reflection of dance today.

The state of dance can be measured both within the dance world and by comparison with the other arts. Music is riven by the pop-classical divide. The tensions between elitism and populism have led to the maintenance of separate institutional structures, separate concert halls, separate kinds of instruments and musicianship, separate record labels.

Yes, the dreaded term "crossover" suggests some amelioration, creatively or corruptly. And yes, lots of people do like lots of different kinds of music. But those institutional and social barriers still reinforce division.

Commercialism puts a strain on all the arts. When one film earns hundreds of times more than the entire budget of another, or one hit series is set against some worthy public television documentary, it becomes hard to think of everyone residing happily under a single tent.

In that sense, dance is lucky to be poor. Dancers are paid less than other performing artists. Dance companies, even the big ballet troupes, must furiously run in place, like terpsichorean hamsters, just to sustain themselves.

But that means dancers do it for love, not fame or fortune, though some are famous, and a very few earn modest fortunes. Dance critics can still cover any and all forms of dance without feeling that they're sullying themselves. (Yes, there was, is and always will be "Riverdance," but still ....) And even when it seems that dance is fragmenting into subcults, you come upon downtowners at the ballet, or balletomanes at modern-dance concerts - even by choreographers not named Mark Morris.

It also helps that dance's past is relatively brief and less surely documented than that of other arts. Classical music suffers from the sheer weight of its accrued traditions. There is a giant backlog of plays and operas, so many that the principal source of novelty now seems to be insightful or silly reinterpretations.

The less-than-400-year history of formal dance offers no such richness, but no such millstone, either. There are a few big story ballets whose choreography and proper style of dance become the source of intensive commentary. Individualized techniques like Martha Graham's struggle to sustain and even institutionalize themselves. But dance remains deliciously evanescent, which opens it up to new impulses. Dance audiences bemoan the dearth of new choreographers. But at least they want novelty.

Beyond such comparative yardsticks, life in dance today comes from the blurring of traditions and techniques. The big ballet companies are constantly looking for new choreographers: Christopher Wheeldon can't do everything. As often as not, they look for those choreographers in modern dance. Mr. Morris's "Sylvia" was a charming hit last season at the San Francisco Ballet. Trisha Brown's "O zlozony/O composite," based on poetry by Czeslaw Milosz and Edna St. Vincent Millay, finished a wildly applauded run at the Paris Opera Ballet late last month. Ms. Brown, 68, was making her first new dance for a ballet company.

By the same token, not all modern choreographers use natural movement or contact improvisation or create their own dance vocabularies. Everyone rests on some sort of tradition, and ballet technique expresses a particularly well-articulated tradition. Merce Cunningham, among others, uses ballet terminology in class, and it's easy to see a ballet base in his style.

Choreographers today, despite complaints about the absence of titans, remain more open to popular impulses and vital currents in the other arts than, say, most classical composers or English-language playwrights. You generally hear more interesting music, all along the spectrum from popular to classical, at dance concerts than at musical concerts. And Mr. Harris is hardly alone in embracing popular dance traditions. Twyla Tharp, anyone? Susan Stroman?

In my own case, a much fuller and deeper immersion in loft- and small-theater dance is in store. It will be fascinating to find out how much vitality is out there. There will be determined veterans who ply their craft in annual recitals, and downy postgraduates searching, no doubt mostly in vain, for their own choreographic voice. But maybe there's more.

Just how "scenes" evolve - a whole group of artists producing similar but individual work, reinforcing one another and building momentum that transcends any one of them - remains a tantalizing mystery. Virgil Thomson uncorked one of his spontaneous one-liners when asked why a scene of expatriate Americans flowered in Paris in the 1920's and 30's. "Real estate," said he, meaning cheap rents. The same could be said of SoHo 35 years ago, which helped lure the Judson Church dance experimenters, like Ms. Brown. But such excitement must also derive from the chance coming-together of brilliant and like-minded artists. Or from flames fanned by impassioned critics.

Even if such a scene in dance evolves, or already exists, that shouldn't lessen our faith in the unity of dance. Ballet will thrive, thrilling audiences with fresh young dancers and the 19th-century classics. The established modern companies, with or without their founders, will carry on. Companies of all kinds will visit us, and it would be nice to think that we will be properly perceptive yet open to what they have to tell us. As in music, dance traditions from all over the world will inspire us.

And one day, maybe emerging from some obscure new scene - bubbling under, as Billboard magazine likes to say -choreographers will emerge who will bring us new modern companies and grand new ballets. To me, it all seems pretty hopeful. We'll see how reality matches up with optimistic expectations.

Source: New York Times