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 for art making - the artistic truth, and the people it will be shared with.
No one is to blame for this. Not the artists reducing themselves to services providers and not the gatekeepers acting as midllemen. 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).
The day in which it will be dance makers who have the power to select programmers, theater and festival directors (as well as fire them), rather then small time politicians, is the day a possible shift can take place.
However hard it may seem, dance makers have to be able to ignore completely what the theater’s gatekeepers want, need and expect, and answer first and foremost to what the artistic process requires, with the audience in mind as the final aim of 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, décentralisation, 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 on.
