IT STARTED WITH RE-THINKING THE URGENCY OF THEATRE DANCE
FRAMING MY FIRST SUSTAINABLE BELIEFS
The urgency to start a blog around re-thinking artistic strategies started mainly from the need to mind the gap between professional dance practice and society, which is addressed on multiple festivals and conferences around the topic nowadays. In the Netherlands art is discussed and dance seen as abstract and useless...except in So you think you can dance.
I don't want to trigger the discussion of the value of dance art on television. Actually, I am wondering why an audience always needs to make the movement to go to a theatre or not. It seems to me an old-fashioned expectation, where theatres are build on. In other words, what happens in the theatre, mainly stays in the theatre.
This is a problem, because it doesn't stimulate a sustainable connection between art and society. It emphasizes indirectly the segregation between the art world and daily world. People have to make a choice whether they want to be involved in performance art by visiting a separate specialized, conventional theatre (see the illustration of 'Theater Carre' as an example of such a place that people visit for a long time now). This makes me interested in the question how to re-connect artistic strategies to the living society, avoiding an audience to ask themselves if they want to see a performance tonight...or not.
But the question where art should take place is just one of many in this topic and questioned in dance often (for example in the illustration left by Black Dance Company, London UK). So where lays the potential of contemporary dance practice? And how can I make this potential visible? That's how the idea for this blog came to existence in the first place.
To be able to turn this perspective around I propose a contemporary term used in new perspectives on social gatherings and community building by different means: Inclusive dance practice. Not the same as inclusion dance, where dancers and non-dancers with all kinds of different abilities take workshops together or perform new ways of embodiment. Inclusive dance refers to a new way of organizing the art form within a social context: Based on principles to include all kinds of people, but also founded on a contextual & process-based structure. New initiatives in dance to connect with society, embracing larger topics than only dance itself and with the intention to use dance in order to research and learn something. And here, collaboration is at the core of the activity.
From this point of view, art in society isn't reflecting on social problems from a distance and elitist position, but it is actually part of what happens to build different ways of care, communication, education and organization. These art projects are engaging and desire to create impact. Artistic strategies could therefor contribute to the art of living. And that is the main sustainable principle that dance, with moving bodies, with mind & body connected, with food connected to energy can deepen in contemporary society.
Existing and new intitiatives of including more people by dance projects are created by artists with a different mindset and qualities in self-management. These artists are stepping outside their comfort zone of the studio and theatre to connect their artistic practice to people. I will write about multiple examples of sustainable inclusive practice in dance art in the future to reflect on and illustrate the social gain of it.
The urgency to start a blog around re-thinking artistic strategies started mainly from the need to mind the gap between professional dance practice and society, which is addressed on multiple festivals and conferences around the topic nowadays. In the Netherlands art is discussed and dance seen as abstract and useless...except in So you think you can dance.
I don't want to trigger the discussion of the value of dance art on television. Actually, I am wondering why an audience always needs to make the movement to go to a theatre or not. It seems to me an old-fashioned expectation, where theatres are build on. In other words, what happens in the theatre, mainly stays in the theatre.
This is a problem, because it doesn't stimulate a sustainable connection between art and society. It emphasizes indirectly the segregation between the art world and daily world. People have to make a choice whether they want to be involved in performance art by visiting a separate specialized, conventional theatre (see the illustration of 'Theater Carre' as an example of such a place that people visit for a long time now). This makes me interested in the question how to re-connect artistic strategies to the living society, avoiding an audience to ask themselves if they want to see a performance tonight...or not.
But the question where art should take place is just one of many in this topic and questioned in dance often (for example in the illustration left by Black Dance Company, London UK). So where lays the potential of contemporary dance practice? And how can I make this potential visible? That's how the idea for this blog came to existence in the first place. From this point of view, art in society isn't reflecting on social problems from a distance and elitist position, but it is actually part of what happens to build different ways of care, communication, education and organization. These art projects are engaging and desire to create impact. Artistic strategies could therefor contribute to the art of living. And that is the main sustainable principle that dance, with moving bodies, with mind & body connected, with food connected to energy can deepen in contemporary society.
Existing and new intitiatives of including more people by dance projects are created by artists with a different mindset and qualities in self-management. These artists are stepping outside their comfort zone of the studio and theatre to connect their artistic practice to people. I will write about multiple examples of sustainable inclusive practice in dance art in the future to reflect on and illustrate the social gain of it.
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