Most dance works being created, are made with the programmers/presenters in mind. Dance makers are focused on the needs, interests, agendas and so on, of the specific group of people who potentially, can allow them to share their work with an audience (and to a lesser extent, but it’s as present, to the ones who will critic their work)
The dance world is structured in such a way, that makers have zero direct access to theaters and their audiences (the two essential elements needed in order to make sense of it all). Dance makers and their work have to be selected in order to be able to share their art.
This simple fact has a huge impact, consciously or not, on the work being made. It results in work that have very little to do with what the art form needs and is about, and at the same time, it is mostly worthless for the audiences who will receive it at the end of this hunger games like chain.
Makers create work while looking up towards the people at the top of an artificially constructed pyramid, while abandoning the core reason and recipients of art making - the artistic truth, and the people it will be shared with.
The result? Artists who perfect the art of politics and an entire field who is mostly an appearance of the thing, rather than the thing itself.
No one is to blame for this. Not the artists reducing themselves to services providers and not the gatekeepers acting as middlemen. People, like water, tend to take the shape of their container. The system in place for the presentation of dance works, is configured in such a way, that this outcome is inevitable. Highly centralized and hierarchical systems, naturally create gates and asign them with keepers. The gatekeepers in turn, answer first of all to the system which appointed them and which gives them power and ressources, rather than to the users (artists and the audience).
However hard it may seem, dance makers have to be able to ignore completely what the the gatekeepers want, need and expect, and answer first and foremost to what the artistic process requires, with the audience in mind as the reason for it all.
Thoughts about what can be an alternative system to this one, are inevitable. There must be a better way to do this. A less top to bottom centralized one, where simple rules of sharing, supply and demand, merit and especially, decentralization, guide the flow of art and artists. A system which is in service to art and its audience, rather than to itself while taking both hostages.
In a way, in order to fix the choreographic art form, we need to fix the system in which it operates. But for this, we need to first fix the entire system society is structured upon.
