A tall figure wearing black stands between lines of empty folding chairs. She interlaces her fingers behind her neck, folds her face between her elbows.
From my place in the chairs behind her, I can hear her breath. It is unsteady and uneven. Maybe performing for a small audience in a studio is harder than performing for a packed theater.
The dancer in front of me steps onto the floor and begins dancing in silence. Then ambient music fills the room.
I watch as her movements become steadily jerkier, an elbow, a knee jutting out, her face contorted.
And I lose focus. What is the dancer supposed to be feeling? I start wondering if everyone else in the room gets it. The audience, a silent and diverse row of spectators, watches her patiently. Some have their brows furrowed. Others don’t pretend to be interested.
One man, larger than most of the audience members, with a full beard and a plaid shirt, glances at his watch.
There is a disconnect in this room. How did we get here? How did I get here? Dance used to be understandable. Even at small modern dance shows, I didn’t always feel so lost.
The studio is on the north side of Jennifer Muller’s loft space on 24th Street in Manhattan. At one end of the space lies an office, a living space, and in the center a bathroom and kitchen. The studio lies at the other end. Tonight, it serves as a theater where emerging dance makers show their work. It is the kind of space you only find in New York, and adds to Jennifer’s charm as a New York City creator of modern dance, and a supporter of young modern choreographers.
The other dance pieces pass in a haze of complex group dances and peculiar use of spoken word. The HATCH Presenting Series, a performance series for young choreographers hosted by Jennifer Muller/The Works, concludes as Jennifer Muller gathers the choreographers in the middle of the studio for a panel discussion.
She looks out at the room, filled for the most part with empty chairs, and back to the choreographers, seated in a line in the middle of the studio. After thanking the miniscule audience for staying to hear the discussion, Muller asks the choreographers a simple, yet powerful question: “Why dance?”
“It’s the one place where I can be truly honest,” one choreographer replies. “It’s the most honest place you can express yourself because – because it’s just you.”
The others nod. Their answers mimic the first. They dance because they learn something about themselves. They dance as a form of self-expression. They dance for personal exploration and self-discovery.
Muller, a slight rigidity in her voice now, her eye on the rows of empty chairs surrounding us, asks the question we have all been wondering about. “What,” she gives the audience a pointed look, “made it difficult for you to bring an audience to see your work this evening?”
The question is met with blank stares. For Jennifer Muller, a highly respected creator of dance, to ask such a question of these young dance makers is, to say the least, incredibly intimidating. One choreographer, pale and fidgeting, wrings her hands in her lap. Another narrows her eyes at the front row.
“The fact is,” Muller continues after a prolonged silences, her voice growing louder, “that when I have my season at the Joyce, I am responsible for bringing an audience. The theater doesn’t bring people. I bring people.”
I stare at the row of choreographers, willing one to answer.
A girl in the middle, her hair pulled back in a tight bun, finally does.
“Well, for me,” she raises her voice, feigning confidence, “I just wasn’t ready for people to see the piece yet.”
Silence. Blank stares. The choreographer is oblivious to how counterintuitive this sounds to an audience of people who have just paid ten dollars to experience her work. She continues.
“I just think that I am in a place where I am not ready to advertise my work. I just feel like I’m not there yet.”
The girl in yellow nods her head. I watch her incredulously, willing her to disagree. She does not.
“I felt that way too.” I watch as Jennifer Muller’s back stiffens, but the girl in yellow doesn’t seem to notice. “It is definitely a challenge for me. I don’t feel confident enough to share my work.”
Muller can only manage a curt, “All right, then.”
The conversation continues. The tiny audience listens politely. They interject ideas about dance and dance makers and choreography they admire. I remain aghast at the choreographers’ answers.
They dance for themselves. They make dances for themselves. They were hesitant to advertise their work and search for audiences. They felt their work wasn't ready to be seen.
And the result is an empty studio. Rows of empty chairs. A lack of exposure, a lack of recognition, the loss of all the elements that support dance makers in this country – audiences, donors, the press – all lost to the self-centeredness of a young choreographer unwilling to seek an audience because their work is nothing more than personal exploration.
They would rather keep their dances to themselves. Because their ideal audience is the self, looking back at them through movement.
It is a truly valid experience. You discover yourself through dance in a way no other practice can provide. But creating choreography is different.
A man in a plaid shirt makes a brave observation.
“The thing is that to an outsider, the dance world is," he pauses, “intimidating.”
A faint muttering echoes through the studio. The man in the plaid shirt glances adjusts his collar, raises an eyebrow. I stare, incredulous. What kind of a person would say such a thing in a room full of dance enthusiasts?
But he is right. Dance, in New York City especially, has become a small niche filled with dance experts and closed off from the city at large. New York, a place that was once the worldwide center of dance, now hosts a dwindling dance community that refuses to interact with the city at large. Now dance in New York is elitist, for a select few. It’s unapproachable.
And perhaps it is because we have fallen into this trap. We have started not only to dance for ourselves, but to create dances for ourselves, dances that wouldn't be interesting to anyone but us.
Is it simply the young, barely emerging choreographers who have done so? Do the most successful creators of dance create work for others instead? I decide to head to Brooklyn to see what they might have to say.
Andrea Miller's new space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn mimics that of Jennifer Muller’s HATCH event. Folding chairs are lined on a studio floor. Cheerful Ikea lanterns hang from the ceiling.
The space belongs to Andrea Miller's company, Gallim Dance, and mimics her casual air. She sits at the front of the room with Kyle Abraham and Brian Brooks, slumped on a red couch with one bare foot tucked underneath her, the other dangling towards her audience. As if she is at home chatting with friends, and watching television. You wouldn’t know by looking at her that she has become one of New York’s most influential young creators of modern dance in the past seven years.
Abraham and Brooks seem a great deal more aware of their position. Both wear fitted shirts, Abraham’s buttoned up to his neck. They sit like dancers.
Throughout the discussion, Miller’s influence upon them is clear: they begin to slouch, laugh, freely pass the microphone between them. They agree with her on almost everything.
Miller marvels at the loneliness of being a choreographer, faced with the daunting task of fundraising and grant writing. And despite their success, it seems these three influential dance makers are hardly immune to the hardships of creating dance in a place with so little funding.
All three admit that they write their grants themselves.
“I micromanage,” Brooks laughs, “I had a fight with [my company manager] just this morning. She wanted to do a grant. I don’t have time to do it.”
Miller and Abraham nod knowingly. It seems that time is hard to come by if you have your own dance company.
“She wants to outsource.” Brooks gives a sheepish look at his audience. “I can’t stand it.”
A chorus of laughs.
“I think we’ll be outsourcing,” he adds.
More laughter.
Brooks continues, “I think I was working for many years before I realized I had a business. I went through a mental shift, from dance to business.”
Miller and Abraham nod in agreement. It seems that they have become accustomed to being fundraisers, PR managers, and businesspeople as well as being artists. And yet, when I finally ask them about finding and building audiences, about for whom they are creating work, they seem to have very few answers.
Kyle Abraham answered vaguely that the community of the piece should inform the its advertising. (For Abraham, community seemed to be the theme of the evening.)
“So for example, you have Brian’s incredibly mathematical work," Abraham and Brooks exchange laughs, “and so you approach IBM, or some place that would value that, and you show them.”
Abraham then launched into a proud tour of his own experiences as a choreographer. “I’ve had people come up to me… the work spoke to them.” Community, for Abraham, is when someone gives you a compliment on your work. The idea of using different niche communities to support the dance community is a unique idea, and yet it was clear that Abraham had never actually used it for his own work. And thus it seems that most choreographers, those who are highly successful and those who are just barely beginning to launch a career, are content for dance to remain a niche art form. An art form that only those who are members of that community are able to interact with.
The other choreographers had little to add.
The trouble is that if we continue to think of dance in this way, as a functionining niche with no need for outside influences, dance will not survive. There are not many of us. There are not enough of us to truly keep dance thriving. As a community, the niche community that we are, we have a responsibility to change this. Because the reason art is great and the reason art is worth creating is not because it's a private joke between friends, something only a select few understand or value.
It is for a much larger and more influential group. Which means we have to stop creating dance for ourselves.
But go on, dance for yourself. In class, during a soaring grande allegro, fly for yourself. But when you create dance, when you are in the studio with a choreographer, think of the community outside of your own. The community who doesn't know or care what grande allegro means, but will take notice of movement to music if it is performed and created with an audience in mind.
It is our nature as human beings to do so. And dance makers satisfy that need, a need that has been forgotten in today's popular culture. Nobody cares about dance except dance enthusiasts, dance lovers, Alastair Macauley and his readers.
Let's change that.
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