“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”.
