Tonight I'm having a sort of debrief with all of my dancers, talking about their experiences over the course of the quarter, and where I am seeing the documentary heading: sort of a roundtable thing. I'm sort of using this blog post as a way to get my ideas out of what I want to talk about - sort of collect it all together in one place, and share it with you all.
I spent some of yesterday looking at interviews I've gathered this quarter, both from dancers and observers, and I have come across something I did not expect: I can't seem to get anything but positive responses...
Now, don't get me wrong, I love the idea that my goal of having dance become a part of everyday life is something people take very positively to. Maybe this concept is pure gold, and there are few problems coming from it. Which is of course true, there have been some problems that have arisen. However, those tend to be more glitch-like than massive roadblocks. Most of them feel like problems that could be smoothed over with time, or simply be dealt with.
But really, I get mostly positive responses with a negative thought here and there, spliced in for good measure. The problem with this is I feel like I'm getting very surfacey with all my interviews. I don't feel as if the situation is being fully investigated, and basically the documentary will be "Dance if fun! It's good to put it EVERYWHEEEEEERRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!"
...yeah, not quite what I'm going for. I'm looking for an honest investigation of this process and an idea of what it would be like if implemented into everyday culture. Instead, I'm getting flowers, when what I really want are the whys and interworkings of this process: why it works/doesn't work, how it shapes those who are involved on a deep level. Most things in life affect us in one way or another, either short of long term. What I am curious about is 1. will it affect the participants in a short or long term way 2. why it is one or the other, and lastly 3. what exactly are those effects and what exactly do they mean in the everyday life of these individuals. These are huge questions, and I feel like I need huge answers to fill their shoes. I am not attempting to make a dinky little student Q&A, but instead looking to professionally (or as close as I can get to professionally) delve into completely new territory for the medium of dance.
This is not to say that I haven't found very interesting information. The idea of community, and personal connection have repeatedly come up from both dancers and observers. I have often asked how the experience of having dance a part of everyday life relates to other forms of art such as architecture, statues, music, iPods, etc. So often, people talk about the human connection that is created between a dancer and an observer. One girl even went so far as to say that she felt like statues and sculptures were a waste of money, whereas having a dancer performing everyday was much more beneficial. For no reason other than the fact there was a real human connection being made between the dancer and observer, and the connection between the inanimate object and the observer was (no pun intended) much less alive. It seemed as if she was saying that the connection between sculpture and human had an end point. As if you gained a certain amount of knowledge, were affected to a certain level, and then that amount of impact plateaued or petered off.
Now, I don't know if I completely agree with those opinions, but I think it brings up some extremely intriguing ideas. For one, while all of our dance has not been totally crazy and abstract-weird shit, most of it has kept that aesthetic intact. Especially because we all go to Ohio State which seeps us in abstract, contemporary, scholastic modern. Either way, people are nonetheless connecting with us dancers. They are not being completely perturbed by a type of dance that often is thought of as "weird" "hard to understand" and "making no sense." This could be for a number of reasons, which I will continue to investigate. Nonetheless, it is incredibly interesting to me the effect of dance as art causing so much human connection between the viewer and dancer. I feel like art in general is very much about human communication, human expression, and human connection. If dance in everyday settings then connects observer and dancer so effectively, it seems as if dance in such a setting may be one of the most natural places for it...instead of the stage. Which is ironic seeing as my dancers have often felt weird when first dancing in public spaces. And even more intriguing is the fact that dance in fact started in social, everyday settings. It's only been in the more recent few thousand years of human existence that dance has been removed from its place of origin.
What this documentary may in the end show is that dance as a part of everyday life, while first in my mind was thought of as a completely new endeavor in the world of dance, may in fact simply be a remembrance of where it all began and the core of what dance is in the first place.
It's been so long removed, that like a legend of old, has completely been forgotten. Like an oral story that's never been written down, and is just now being deciphered.
Exciting.
