Modern Dance is Stupid

Why am I picking on poor old Modern Dance?  I wonder.  But it just drives me nuts.  I guess it can all be summed up by my friend Chris who observed: "Why are they always cracking out of eggs?"  Don't pretend like you haven't seen this routine - a body compressed, perhaps squatting, receives some musical cue of "life force" and proceeds to unfold, rise, stretching and extending limbs into space ... and always with a particular quality of movement, ugh, that quality of movement is the worst.  How to describe?  "Sensual" (or gross) ... graceful, flowing, light or syrupy ... urging, questing, yearning ... and acutely "beautiful". There is an arrogance to the movement quality of modern dance that disturbs and bores me, in this premature assumption of "beauty" and the way "beauty" can really stifle an art form.   Case in point: "always cracking out of eggs" - can we, as artists, strive for a little more in our expression than basic life processes? 

Now of course the disclaimer is that radical concepts can be and are applied to dance on a regular basis - certainly folks out there are doing revolting, compelling, chilling and otherwise unusual things with their body medium.  Of COURSE this happens, thank goodness.  But there is a common form that is a plague among us, which thrives basically as a veiled Erotica Lite, an excuse to view young bodies in various extremes of pushing, pulling, straining ... whirling, leaping ... and always a slave to this unique Standard of Beauty, where all movement flows, strides, bursts, and whirls with smooth suppleness.  This diatribe isn't against erotica, but the mundane Playboy-style erotica that "modern dance" mirrors - an endless repetition of the most inviting, the most presentational, the embodiments of Ideal which pretends seduction as it imposes arrogant distance.  For the price of a ticket we are afforded a view of the human woodland animal of time immemorial, muscular, svelte, powerful, pendulous, with pointed toes and fluted fingers.  Each of us is afforded a body, but only the dancer's body is allowed to approach a pure ideal of Body Beauty, apparently, and we are intended to be awestruck by the grace of their exertions.  Well, I'm not buying it.  I watch these arrogant young people put on their arrogant young dances and vampirically feed from the envious and awe-ful gaze of the cramped, the withered, the limping, the cubicle bound.  I find this effort to whitewash the body pretty distasteful and rude. 

How about the Modern Dancer's portrayal of emotion? This is where dance painfully crawls out of the realm of theater.  They could have stopped at pantomime, but someone had to turn on the music ... egad, the choices of music ... suddenly the actions of the everyday are translated BIG, grand, arms are FLUNG, heads are WHIPPED, hands are clasped over chests that swell as the dancer inhales, deeply, attempting to communicate the pleasure or pain of human experience through body medium; body responding to "life" as represented by "music".  Well, the whole thing is just embarrassing!  Really!  I mean I can't be the only one acutely embarrassed, cringing and shrinking in my seat, can I?  Please tell me you, too, have seen "confusion" or "anguish" conveyed by some fingers to the temples, eyes closed, head rhythmically tearing back and forth ... and just gritted your own teeth and held your own breath until it ended. 

You know, the fault lies probably not with the dancers or the choreographers or the medium or the art form, but probably with audiences that don't really ask for too much.  I mean Playboy is a big seller, you know?  They wanna see good looking people do good looking things, and they want it to be neat - like, over and above the everyday world, but "nice", too: glorious, masterful, positive and essentially escapist.  This modern dance I am railing against is the equivalent of Hollywood endings, reggae festivals, ice skating - slutty "art forms" that demand little and offer lots of soothing salve and mind escaping.  Just let our bodies prance across your vision and stir your "soul" - you relax and take a load off.  But why do I care?  I must, myself, gravitate to art that I "like" - though it may be uncommon and slightly abrasive, it probably turns out that my soul is getting stirred in a very similar mindless way that humans enjoy or even require from their culture.  I just come from a different planet, so I like different things.  FINE - but not fine!  

Because: dance is pretty awesome.  Bodies are pretty great.  But there is a whole heck of a whole fuck of a lot of shit that you can do with a body in front of an audience of bodies for the purposes of entertainment and communication and expression that are not this form of "modern dance" that I find so embarrassing, limited, and moronic.  There is so much potential to a body in space being observed by other bodies in space - why resort to boring old grace and beauty?  Much like my extreme disappointment with the dance form "Contact Improv" - which sure sounds like infinite possibility, but actually ends up being a fairly limited format - I am impatient for all of these "modern dancers" to finally get fed up with being so goddamn graceful and exquisite and really start to use the medium for something more than an ego trip.  Ahem.