Contemporary Dance on Wikipedia

Music can be written down. Paintings can be restored and coped. Buildings can be planned on paper.

Dance cannot be written down.

Although you can record dance on videotape, it is a poor replacement for experiencing dance in the moment. And so the traditions of dance are communicated verbally. There are very few concrete definitions. Information is passed on in studios, through the movements themselves.

Classical ballet is old enough that a vocabulary has been established and communicated, and specific traditions have been set. Modern dance is not. Although some modern dance techniques have a codified system, the newest forms of dance do not.

The dance community relies on the dancers themselves to preserve and add to its vocabulary, traditions and history. Although there are many books about the history of dance, most have a limited perspective. Every modern dancer since Isadora Duncan will tell a different version of the same story, simply because it is the way things have been done since dance began.

So the history of dance is not in books. It isn't in videotapes either. It isn't written on music papers, or recorded in some universal blackboard of what dance is about. Dance is recorded in a unique and very profound way.

It's in our bodies.

A beautiful idea, in theory. The truest and most direct version of the history of dance is recorded in the bodies and movement qualities of today's dancers, passed kinesthetically from generation to generation. But when we are asked to write down our vocabulary, history, and traditions, often the key concepts are left out as they are so difficult to illustrate.

Essentially, the more dance progresses as an art form, the more difficult it is to put into a textbook. The terms that define different types of dance evolve.

Wikipedia's "Contemporary Dance" page is an excellent example of this. It places a mysterious and poorly justified emphasis upon the Cunningham technique.

This is probably because whoever took the time to write the page had the most experience with the Cunningham technique and was less familiar with other forms of contemporary dance.

The issue becomes even more complicated as the definition of "Contemporary" dance shifts, depending on whom you ask. And recently, the terms that define modern and contemporary dance are constantly evolving.

Often, Wikipedia is criticized because it allows for anyone to edit or add to the pages, damaging its credibility.  But this is what makes Wikipedia ideal for the dance community. If we were all able to contribute what we know, the "Contemporary Dance" page would be a great deal more informative than it is now.

Although I cannot make the page more inclusive of all the contemporary techniques out there, I can contribute what I have learned in the past year dancing at Jennifer Muller/The Works.

Before I edited the "Dance Technique" section of the page, it was a long list of terms. It ignored many important dance techniques related to contemporary dance. The list format was overwhelming and the way it referred to Pilates and Yoga as if they are equally as important to Contemporary Dance as Graham and Horton technique was misinformed.

You can see the changes I made here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_dance

I encourage dancers to educate their communities about the art form. Modern dance is even more of an obscure niche than classical ballet. We can start to change that by contributing to our communities. Dancers, go on Wikipedia and make the change!