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What Dance Has to Say About Beauty,
FISCHBECK. It’s not that audiences have no more channels or no more ability to perceive and experience beauty. They are ready, in the same way that we are, to experience what is real, or what is captivating, or what is engaging. When my company on occasion went out on the street to dance, people would gather and watch. Most of them had no idea what they were watching. We were not trying to do something to them; we were just there. Opening up the organic and expressive side of a particular dance to the audience is what I’m concerned with. People actually can experience the beauty, the realness, the truth of the nature of movement in whatever form it comes. BAZELL. Is beauty our responsibility? That’s a big question for me. DALY. How do you deal with the audience expectations that you know or imagine are there? FISCHBECK. Well, we need to go on and do what we’re doing. But there is another side to our work. People grow up with music, they grow up with art, they grow up with literature. They do not grow up with dance, for the most part. The dance experience has to be made available on a much larger scale. Dancers, choreographers or teachers, all of us, need to keep that in mind. The teaching of dance, bringing that into the school or into the everyday experiences of people in whatever way you can think of, should be part of our concern. CARSON. I’m working in a humorous vein, and I find that I can say almost anything as long as I make people laugh. Making them laugh gives me license to talk about something that’s very uncomfortable. In terms of beauty, you’ve got to give a little beauty if you want to give a little ugly and keep people in their seats. DALY. What does dance know about beauty that visual art hasn’t grasped? ANN VACHON (choreographer). When Manfred was talking before, I kept getting an image of his daughter. I had the experience of watching her in a performance in which she was so incredibly focused on what she was doing that I almost was worried that she had lost touch with herself. That kind of total focus of the performer in the moment is beautiful. SCHOEFER. The concept of beauty in dance has something to do with presence. It’s just a moment, really. Not only, in a traditional sense, is it this human form making this ideal form right now. It is also right now that this human being is alive and breathing and making an action. FISCHBECK. When you look at somebody dancing, you see who that person is. You can talk to them for three hours. You can know all of their stuff, but when they start dancing, you see them. It’s only in dance where you can have that. |