LOVE IS THE ROOT OF ALL

Good Goes Bad and Beyond

Cool is good. But does anyone actually want to admit we are trying to be good? No. It's much cooler to be bad. But if trying to be bad is cool then shouldn't we not follow the herd and be good? It's damn confusing. It's damn subjective. It doesn't matter.

This dance project exists in the gap between dance in the Contemporary Dance world and dance in society.

I am not so not interested in adhering to what is good in the dance industry. It started at a point of frustration with how formulaic good is in the dance industry, how insular its own world is, how removed it is from LIFE. How little it demands of itself in terms of relevance to LIFE. How simplified and ridiculous it is, and how naievely the whole entire industry cannot see this. Taking the simplified nonsense it produces so seriously is a ridiculous sight.

So I started thinking about trying to present the "bad". Using every cliched element of contemporarydance production. Squares of light, complicated abstract movement phrases made by using letters of the alphabet, androgynous costumes, obssession with open parrallel stance, empty expression on the face... And then this might parody the "good." And then be "cool." Which is what we want, sort of, at least. But there was a hiccup on the way, I discovered the imdominable force of Celine Dion. And she has opened up a can of love worms.

What is Celine Dion? She is the ultimate manifestation of LOVE in the commercial world. 200 songs in her career, 198 devoted to the exploration of love between a man and a woman. She is in the top ten list of Biggest selling female recording artists of all time behind Maddona, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. Her whole life is about love. Her whole world is about with how much she loves her 14 brothers and sisters, her mother, her fans, her collaborators, her home country, her music and her manager- Rene Angelil. The only man she's ever known and loved, 28 years her senior and her lover since she was just 16. Totally extreme stuff. The ultimate. So complex. So huge.

You ask a person vaguely interested in being cool, what they think of Celine DIon, throw in a phrase such as "Celine Dion will have a bigger legacy than John Lennon in 100 years time" and one gets extreme responses of absolute disgust. Similar to that of the name John Howard/George Bush. But for Celine, like John Howard/George Bush, there must be some out there who like her, it is actually a lot. Is it not the dismissal of artists such as Celine Dion highlighting the narrow window of acceptable topics we are willing to consider to work with? Can we equate our dismissal with Celine Dion to a lack of investigation in to the mechanics of the mainstream? The dominant force of the world whose welfare drives global politics and economy. So our quest to destroy the axis of evil is an act of support for Celine Dion.

So what does this have to do with dance? I am working around this idea that as artists we have to get out of this insular world where themes, methods and production go round in circles. Where nothing stands out. Where understanding is pegged to the education of the audience. Not education as in Eton versus Chingford 6th Form College- but whether you're been to a dance institution. Is it so specific that it wipes out the majority of a potential audience base? This acts as a repellent in this world so obsessed with spectacle, flashiness, instant gratification, newness, excitement, sensorial indulgence, speed, excitement, things, stuff, success...

Dance is an integral and unavoidably fun part of society. It is everywhere. It is something every single person on this planet can feel and do for free. It is something that blows people away, instigates romance, exercise, an outlet - to use the cliche - it totally brings people closer together. Ask any dancer why they started a career in professional dance and they will say it's because they seriously love doing it. The fact that so many dancers, after dancing a show still want to go out disco dancing is testament to the power of the dance. There is a huge apetite for dance, poeple just can't get enough of dance. Being in the dance industry we can totally ride this ready made wave.

People are interested in seeing how professionals can take this and turn it into something else. It is a totally brilliant art form full of potentiality and wonder. This art form which is so pervasive throughout all of society - so accessible to so many. It is super ridiculously exciting it makes people watching it sweat. I want to embrace this - and I want to empower those millions of potential audience members. They are just as knowledgeable about dance as me. My dance world has just been cluttered up with the weight of trying to forge a career in an industry tailored for the past.

We can relax a little on the demands we place on ourselves as dancers. It's really hard to train to be a dancer, and right now, honestly, the phrase jack of all trades and master of none has a little bit too much truth. Let's aspire to have a heterogenous base of artists with which to create an array of works that reflects the contradictions, variety and insanity of society.

Let's seek out those making the new as opposed to those making another quality version of something we already know. Let's not be constrained by what we have been taught but challenge what we know and launch ourselves into the territory of the unknown. Let's embrace the battle with this art form so that it means something to us, the dance makers as people not as products of institutions. Tears, belly laughs and grimaces of embarrassment. Let's throw in one massive goodbye to open parallel in performance. Hiding behind technique is not so much fun at all. It's scary.

Dance has the ability to capture the mysteries and complexities of the world and present them in a way that is itself different to all other arts, it also allows audiences to see the world through another lens. Dance is a crucial part of the arts. It's important and valid. It is EASY to inject the life back into this artform. But in order to do this... We'll have to give away the current measuring sticks that are killing it. No art form, not even somethign functional like ceramics survives on the quality of craftsmanship. We need to question the necessity of every single element being used. What don't we need anymore? What is totally under-valued? What do we need to make it relevant to the souls in the audience? What loses them? What excites them? What pisses them off? Are they wrong? Are they right? Are they immature and inflated? Can we take the piss? Have we really ever asked? Can we swallow our pride and take a bashing by asking "normal" people what they actually think of us? And then accept that they are knowledgable about what we do? Do we have the balls to fail? Do we have the balls to make works that make us so excited that we want to work so hard that we don't want to sleep?

Let's not masquerade as being Contemporary by hiding behind the stainless steel/factory chic architecture of the theatre. Let's take our dance to people who will give it a real flogging and can totally have fun doing it, and tailor its production methods to our lifestyles. Take our dances to people whose responses validate our intelligence. Take them to people who will make us feel like the self-indulgent souls we really are, who will really tell us it's shit if they don't like it. This feeling of inadequecy and honest unfiltered reaction might just give us the kick up the arse that will put some relevance back into dance in theatres. It's good to know how the real world actually perceives us. Because we participate in it, we roll around in it every day of our lives, we give and it is reasonable to expect something back. We devote our lives to this artform, it's unfortunate to not be appreciated. It' ll be a bitter pill to swallow, but in the long run, we will be laughing like hell, because we will actually be able to have FUN whilst being paid to work in an art form that heaps of people are interested in.

From a Mr D. Fussell

“Cool” and “bad” are the bounded terms of lived culture; how “we” term what is actually, immediate… treatable by cognisance. There is no common language of dance anymore that is unbounded and immediately available to one’s… daily-life-brain. Love, while no doubt existent to individuals beyond popular culture, has also become… the end unit of late capitalism (the purpose of spending). Figures who through the status of their work somehow represent the fate of humanity are like psychological receptacles for all our fears and desires about the nature of survival. There is such a thing as dancing for a known person; the keenest difficulty for stage dance lies in the greater or lesser degree of anonymity that any audience possesses for the dancer, in a ‘globalising’ world. And dancing purely for pleasure is a recent middle class eventuation so, dance ‘for the millions’ is a far more heterogenous prospect; dance’s purpose is endlessly multiple. It’s also often very easy for a dancer to remap the world around them because of their heightened experience of movement but, because of this their worldview often goes unchallenged – the rigour of movement dissolves before it reaches their thought. Steve Paxton who pioneered contact improvisation once said something to the effect of, in order to do anything truly new it is vital to honour the traditions (of dance). Start with the old and crusty, otherwise the result is not novelty, but a kind of revolving amnesia. Foucault in his introduction to ‘The History of Sexuality’ owned up to his work being one of monumental trial and error; possibly the greatest work on institutional change in modern times. How can we hope to be any more directional? Perhaps the better thing to do is not presume the world is flat or that all people are working to our purpose even in the slightest way. That the purpose of dance is not to inspire but simply to move the substance to which we have immediate access, has effects beyond simply making a living, or re-articulating “life”.