Introductions

Mentally, my jaw was dropped. I just stared like I a kid watching someone pull the beard off Santa. My brain was running on overdrive, trying to analyse the information I was receiving, and I had to do it quick because little did I know that one of my long held beliefs was on the brink of combustion.

Was it possible that this dance show was ill conceived, fractured and boring? A resounding "yes" to all three. I knew the gravity of this epiphany was stronger than what I was understanding.
I looked at my husband sitting on the right of me. He had agreed to join me this evening with varying levels of enthusiasm. I needed a quick second opinion and knew I could find one in his typically expressive face. At that moment his expression read "Oh my ____, why are they doing that, and why am I here watching?" Validating. I took a breath and looked to my left expecting to find a similar look on my Dad. His support had carried him to many performances and I expected that he would think this show as ridiculous as I did. What I saw as I took in my Father's demeanor was a bit jolting. On my Dad's face I saw nothing but unsurprised contentment.

I stopped. This didn't make sense. Usually his reaction is what one would hope to find at a dance performance. His face did not, however, match my assessment of the quality of entertainment taking place on stage.

This triggered a warning in my head. My Dad has been to dozens of dance shows, mostly mine. He should recognize that what he is viewing was not only ill rehearsed but completely self indulgent. As I inwardly gawked at the performance and my husband shifted with boredom, I started computing. My dad was acting as if nothing was out of the ordinary. As if he'd walked through the theater doors with full knowledge that he was about to witness this very type of production.

Wham. It hit me.

Dad did have experience in this end of a dance production. Supportive audience member was not a new role to him as it was for my husband. My dad had developed a tolerance to bad stage performances. He evolved as a survival technique! Over years of dance shows he had had enough exposure to bad stage performances that this current catastrophe was no surprise.
The weight of this sunk slowly but with deadly force to the center of my consciousness. My whole life's work had been no better than what I was currently watching with such mortification.
Dance is boring, I thought. OK, not all of it, but enough to have give Dad the ability to comfortably sit and watch one of the worse performances I'd seen. What about my experiences in the audience? I started mentally flipping though all of the performances I'd been to. Professional, armature, studio, jazz, ballet, modern... there had always been a point, with few exceptions, at which I was bored, and I am a dancer! I recalled conversations with my sister who is also a dancer about the reasons this portion lost the audience, or why that piece was too weird to enjoy, or how it isn't fair to the kids performing that we were forced to leave at intermission after a three hour long first half.

Maybe I'd assumed our shows were just different. Maybe I recognized that I had little control over the content of our shows and so didn't think about them in the same light. Either way, the fact that I was also a party to turning people off to dance hit me with enough force to act as an impetus to repurpose my life's work. I had a need to bridge the gap between artist and audience, to make sure that people like my dad didn't have to muscle through enough half baked performances to require the assumption that "that is just how dance is."

I want to open my blog with this story because it is the experience I have kept in my mind the two years since. It has been a reminder in my work as a teacher and performer to start to look at dance in a different way. I know that I have only scratched the surface of a large and, in many ways, self perpetuating problem, but this new focus excites me.
I invite you to follow as I use this blog to mill through and eventually cement my discoveries, personal and professional, and that you will come to see, as I have, that Dance Means Business.