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Artistic Diatribe

Writer's picture: Cliff DansaCliff Dansa

There are no longer “dancers,” the possessed.

The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. . . .

We have been metamorphosized from a mad body dancing on hillsides

to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.

Jim Morrison


It’s really a strange phenomenon. People who spend their days crammed in a chair and their evenings inert on a sofa, people whose bodies and souls are literally dying from lack of activity, these same people pay money for the opportunity to sit motionless and watch other people dance. This makes sense if we assume that the extreme athleticism, suppleness, and grace of the chosen few on the stage somehow makes up for the debilitating effects of enforced inactivity on the multitudes in the audience in some sort of cosmic balancing act, like the statistician who stands with one hand on a hot stove and the other in the freezer and says, “On average, I’m comfortable.


You can call it art, you can call it culture, you can call it what you want to, but as the audience sits inside their passive vicarious experience, the message is clear: “This is dance. This is the standard by which you will be judged if you even begin to think of yourself as a dancer.” If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, go to the nearest shopping mall and start dancing, just letting your body move and naturally express the experience of being alive. See how the other shoppers in the mall react. See how long it takes the security people to arrive.


At its roots, dancing is just allowing the body to move and very naturally express the experience of being alive, the joys, the sorrows, the heartbreaks and triumphs, the rich tapestry of the experience of being. When you move your body through space, it also becomes something of an antenna picking up emotional and energetic signals from both the outside world and the dancer’s inner being. The body becomes both a receiver and a transmitter in an ongoing dialogue with the universe. It’s as natural as breathing.


Yet, in our culture, we have allowed this most natural of experiences to be defined in terms of performance, which requires, “The division of [humans] into actors and spectators,” as Jim Morrison points out in the quote above. This split is necessary in order for dance to become marketable and valued by a culture which measures the value of everything by the price for which it can be sold.


And this is not to criticize the dancers for being on the stage. They are few meager candles trying to light up a room or a beacon that shines through the night to guide the traveler home. May they be eternally blessed for being willing to do this work. The dancers and the audience are both doing the best they can within the confines of a dysfunctional cultural paradigm, and I am not criticizing them for that. Rather, I am asking, “From whence comes this darkness?”


In his book, The Forest People, Colin Turnbull talks about the time he spent living with the Mbuti pygmies in the forests of the Congo. One night during a festival time, when there was lots of dancing and singing around the fire every night, Turnbull wandered away from the fire into the forest and came upon Kenga, a young man who was a close friend of his, wildly dancing and singing in the moonlight in a small clearing. Turnbull called out to him in a lighthearted way saying, “What are you doing dancing out here by yourself?” Kenga turned and looked at him like he was the biggest fool on earth and said, “I’m not dancing by myself, I’m dancing with the forest.” Where did we lose that relationship with reality? And how can we get it back?


If I’ve been picking on the dance world a bit here, it is only because the division into actor and spectator seems particularly nonsensical in this context. Our cultural attitudes about music are no better and may, in fact, be even worse because of the amounts of money available for the select few.


Within our mainstream cultural paradigm, what do artists do? What is their reason for existence? Artists produce art. Dancers produce dance and musicians produce music. This fundamental human experience of artistic exploration and expression is defined, as is everything in our culture, in terms of a production/consumption model. In a culture grounded on the assumption that “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist,” money is a comforting “measure of all things.” It is tangible, easy to objectify, and measurable, but defining artistic expression in terms of money robs it of its power as a tool for human development and evolution.


Over the years, I have asked many artists of all types—dancers, musicians, visual artists—which they would prefer, to live in a society that supports professional artists or to live in a society in which everyone understands the lessons that they, the artist, have learned from pursuing their art. Almost invariably, they instantly choose the second option. Which suggests that the real purpose of any art form is not to be able to get paid for creating a performance for an audience, but rather to touch something much deeper, something that tends to be—in this culture—either denied, ignored, or actively suppressed.


And so, we have this dichotomy. Professional artists? Or everyone is an artist, which means that artists also do something else to support themselves? Both of these paradigms cannot exist. We can have a culture in which some people can be professional artists, or we can have a culture in which everyone is an artist. We can’t have both.


Professionalism implies the division into actors and spectators, the haves and the have nots. Furthermore, there are many jobs in our culture that are not artistic, not much fun, yet need to get done. To deny this is an insult to working class people everywhere.


This vision of a society in which everyone is an artist is not just a utopian fantasy. This was the perspective on art in the traditional Balinese culture. My teacher, Paul Oertel, visited Bali in the eighties and befriended a young man while he was there who gave him a beautiful detailed pen and ink drawing that was quite large. Paul offered to pay him for it, but he would not take any money for the drawing. Art in the Balinese culture is a part of their spiritual practice and not something to be bought or sold.


I believe that a sane society would have an attitude towards art much like the Balinese attitude. That everyone would be deeply involved in an artistic practice of some type, and that there would be no need for professional artists. Yet, we don’t live in a sane society. In almost everything we do, not just art, we are focused on competition, financial gain, and taking as much a we can from each other. As much as we might not like this, this is the soup in which we swim, this is where we have to do our dance.


This competitive culture is particularly brutal in the world of art. It lets most people know that they are not good enough, convinces them that they can’t sing, can’t dance, because they don’t meet up with some standard of excellence by which “real” art is judged. It cuts most people off from the essential human experience that Kenga was having when he was dancing with the forest.


The division of humans into actors and spectators does more than just convince the audience that they are not dancers. It gives artistic license to a chosen few and at the same time creates a highly competitive system to determine who the chosen few will be. Which forces the performers, if they are going to be allowed to pursue their craft, to focus on being “good” by the standards of the system. In the words of theatre director Peter Brook, “All forms of audience wooing flirt with the same dangerous proposition, ‘Come and share the good life, which is good, because it has to be good, because it contains the best.”


How far this is from the essential joy of Kenga dancing in the moonlit clearing. Where did we lose that relationship with reality? And how can we get it back?








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1 Comment


merileeschultheiss
Jul 29, 2021

I love that you titled this a "diatribe"

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