When I think of my experience with dance as an art, I think of Jason Parsons.
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Jason came to our studio during my junior year of high school. As a traveling dance choreographer, he is well-known in the dance world for teaching "artsy" dance.
He came across as quiet at first, but he was fiercely passionate about his dancing. He yelled if you didn’t have the focus he wanted. He was specific and you needed to give him exactly what he wanted to see.
You were free to your own interpretation, of course. But it needed to be powerful, and powerful in a similar way to what he had envisioned.
I really wanted to be chosen to be in his piece because they were not like our typical dances. They had very few tricks and turns and weren’t meant to impress an audience with our physical abilities.
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They were the type of dance my parents wouldn’t really like or understand. They would comment on how interesting it was, or say something like Shouldn’t you be smiling more?
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He wasn't afraid to make you move your body in a position or direction that you wouldn’t normally move, or one that didn’t look pretty in the conventional "technical" way of dancing.
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It wasn’t meant to be an eye-grabbing performance. It was pure art, with no other distractions.
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He wouldn't select you for his piece if he didn't feel like he wanted to work with your energy. He wanted artistry. To audition for his piece you had to improvise to music he randomly selected.
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It was exhausting.
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Not so much physically, I wasn’t shaking and gasping for breath at the end.
But my brain was.
I was thinking and feeling everything I was doing the entire time as I tried to convey my emotions as purely, honestly, and with as much intensity as I could manage.
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I was selected to be in his piece and I’ll never forget the hours we spent working on it over those three long days.
I loved it. I loved how it felt to move like that.
He purely listened to what his body wanted to do and didn’t follow any of the rules of dance.
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Normally we feed off the music in dance pieces and follow it for our cues of when to move and what our timing should be, but in his piece we fed off each other.
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There were several sections where the music would go quiet but we continued to dance.
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You had to feel when and how everyone else was moving around you and try your best to move synchronously.
You know when you can feel someone’s eyes on you?
Beyond just hearing their footsteps as they walk towards you or seeing them out of the corner of your eye?
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They could be impossible to actually notice, but you can just feel that their focus is directed at you.
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The experience is similar. You use the sounds of their socks dragging on the floor or the depth of their exhales to get an idea of how you should be moving, but it requires every single person to be feeling the same thing.
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That feeling manifests itself as a cohesive group of dancers moving together, using their bodies for a common purpose.
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You are creating shapes together.
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You are bringing ideas and emotions to life together.
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You are feeding off each other as you collaborate to create this art.
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Jason Parsons performing "Turn Me Well" (2010)
When you watch Jason Parsons move there is no question that he is making art with his body.
What else could it be?
He is telling a story.
You can see it from his first few steps. He manages to create art in the way he walks.
It’s in the way he lifts his head. He tells a story through the art of his simple movements without being dramatic and obvious.
It is subtle but it is powerful.
At least, it is to me. You may not see it the same. It might make you feel uncomfortable or bored. Like my parents, you might be thinking, Shouldn’t he be smiling more?
But just because you may want to see dance in a different way doesn't mean it isn't also an art.
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Two different people can look at an abstract painting and come away with entirely different emotions and opinions.
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Similarly, I can fall in love with watching Jason Parsons create art while my parents see no beauty in those simple movements.
The problem is our pre-conceived notions of what it means to be an art.
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I don’t know if anyone would look at the many paintings and sculptures created in Europe and hesitate to call them art.
But we are more likely to pause when it comes to the performing arts.
Humans are by nature categorical. There is a psychological theory that we organize our brains into clumps of related information.
That’s probably why, if asked to rattle off a few forms of art, you’d likely say drawing and painting first.
We all colored in pre-school craft time and got to make a mess with finger-paint in kindergarten art class, so it is engrained in our memory that these are types of art.
ART
DRAW
PAINT
PAINT
DANCE
This is how I picture the layout of our long-term memory.
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A network of interconnected information.
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Depending on when you connected the pieces of information and how often you think about them, the quicker you can make sense of how they are tied together.
I probably added a link between dance and art.
I started when I was three after all, I’ve constantly been exposed to it and seen it function as an art firsthand.
For most of us, we might not see this right away. The non-visual arts like dance or literature make us hesitate before accepting them as arts.
They are not the common example, and they fit in so many other networks as well.
Your Dance bubble is probably right by your Movement bubble, or maybe your Fun bubble or Weddings bubble. It is probably not as quick of a road to Art.
One researcher tried to categorize art into its components and broke it up in a nice clean flow-chart, like this:
THE ARTS
Performing
Media
Visual
Theatre
Dance
Music
Opera
Installation art
Film
Documentary
Digital art
Painting
Sculpture
Crafts
Ceramics
Literary
Fiction
Poetry
McCarthy et al. (2001)
If our brains were clumped like this, I don’t think there’d be any hesitation in shouting Art! When asked about dance. Yet clearly there are other, stronger, connections.
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Maybe we don't think of dance as an art because it's not a clean fit. But there's no reason to think of dance as any less of an art than the classics.
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The dancer is the painter creating images for you to enjoy, just on a stage instead of a canvas.
What interests me as well is that dance and music are separate subdivisions of the same category.
Until I remembered working with Jason, I don’t know if I would have thought of dance as a true art separate from the music.
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Don’t they go together like peanut butter and jelly?
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Don't you need one to have the other?
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Dance feeds off the music- the rhythm and emotion of the song is what inspires the choreographer and the dancer.
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If the music is building, you expect the dancing to grow larger as well. If the music is soft the dance should mirror that.
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My favorite thing about watching someone dance is when you hear something in the song that you had otherwise missed.
You hear it because they chose to accent it.
The dancer quite literally brings that note or that instrument to life and forces you to hear the music the way they do.
This is one way to use dance as an art.
Jason didn’t use music this way.
He let it be in the background, an accessory to the dance that was taking place.
This is more noticeable to us as 'artsy' dance, because the music isn’t overshadowing. It is held apart from the dance.
Merce Cunningham on his working process (1981)
Merce Cunningham was a famous choreographer in the 20th century who tried to fully separate dance and music.
His dancers would move their bodies while music played, yes, but the two were discrete pieces of art with no connection to each other.
It leaves a weird feeling in my stomach to watch. It feels like the dancers are missing something.
Maybe that was the intent. His interpretation of the art of dance might be different than mine. We see different things in the abstract painting.
When the two are used together then, is dance just an amplifier to the art of music?
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It often can function as an amplifier. But it affects you differently because it attacks a different sensory system.
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You are seeing what you would otherwise only be hearing. Is that difference enough to make it a different art form?
To me it is.
It is similar, but the dancer isn’t just the creator of something you are seeing in the future, they are an active part of the art you are seeing.
The art is alive and being created in front of you, it can morph and change into something different in front of your eyes.
Regardless of if dance is closely tied to the music behind it or being held at arms distance, it is still an art.
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You feel something when you do it and you feel something when you watch it. What type of feeling you experience depends on your perception.
Regardless of what it makes you feel, whether its positive or negative, the very fact that it can conjure emotions is what makes it an art.