It’s hard to take seriously the opinion of anyone who watched a contemporary choreographic work just one time. Especially if that one time was the premiere. Unfortunately, that is the case for almost everyone whose opinion will have the most impact on the work’s public perception and stage life.
There’s an inherent process happening over time of studying a specific work, which serves as a gateway into actually ‘seeing’ it. Choreography, like music, grows on the viewer overtime through repeated viewings, especially when it involves new forms, new ideas or new ways of doing the choreographic thing. It takes time to ‘get’ a choreographic work, it involves a process of expanding one’s perception in new ways in order to be able to access a deeper, fuller form of experience. On top of that, being that choreographies are living entities (if treated in that manner of course), they tend to change and evolve over their ‘life time’, especially in the earlier phases, going through a process of revealing potentials, adjusting and fine tuning their timeline and getting rid of superfluous content, which was necessary for the creation process, but becomes irrelevant over time for the work as a whole - a thing that requiers time to be correctly identified and carried out.
The existing format in the performing arts, doesn’t allow for this. By default, choreographic works are watched one time, which implies a huge gap between the potential they hold and the way in which they are perceived.
If one wishes the ‘see’ a choreographic work, one needs to experience it multiple times over a long period, in different venues and with different groups of public. Anything less than this, is remaining on the surface.
That being said, the absolute majority of works being presented nowadays, don’t deserve even that one viewing. The reason why they make it to stage in the first place, is probably linked to the ‘one time’ format, as they are made with the intention to ‘work’ instantly in order to secure an immediate reaction from the viewer, but would have no chance to sustain multiple views. The ‘single time’ default format of the art form and the low level of readership it engenders, is what allows for shallow, superficial, simplistic and poorly made works to find their way into existence, receive legitimacy and sometimes, even raving reviews and across the board acceptance. This phenomena is very much the result of ‘things taking the shape of their container’, where the way in which a system is defined and configured, has a massive impact on the nature, behavior and perception of the things which grow within it.
Another side effect of the current model for presenting and sharing live choreographic works, has to do with the fragmented perception of the entire oeuvre of specific choreographers. It is almost impossible to find anyone, besides the artists themselves, who actually experienced live the entirety of the works made by a specific choreographer, especially if they have been creating work over a long period of time.
Imagine trying to form an opinion about Picasso based on just a few of his paintings, detached from his entire ouvre stretching over decades and navigating between radically different periods, styles, mediums, techniques and influences. Or Bach, after listening one time to only three or four of his pieces out of the thousands he has written, or again, Shakespeare, after reading only Hamlet. One time. That would be inconceivable. Taking one, or even a few works out of the context of an artist’s oeuvre that was created over decades, and trying to understand them outside of the complexity of an artist’s entire creative process, is like trying to describe an elephant with your eyes close, while touching the tip of the trunk (given that you have a notion of what an animal is, but never actually saw an elephant and don’t even know they exist).
The separate works of every long term artist, are all parts of the same process. They form a singular whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. It’s almost impossible to fully grasp a specific artist’s work outside of that whole. Here again, the format makes it almost impossible to generate a comprehensive view of a choreographer’s work in its entirety, and then, out of this radically limited point of view, to try and form a meaningful opinion regarding an isolated work.
Unlike the other art forms which leave behind them objects that can be easily accessed and studied, the choreographic art form is bound to its primordial link to the present time and its limited live renditions, restricting the access to it and limiting the opportunities to engage with it and as a consequence, study it in a profound manner.
Time though, on a very long-term scale, has a tendency to correct these distortions, resulting in massive changes in how certain works were perceived at the time when they were made, as opposed to a radically different discourse around them (or a straightforward non existing one) once some time has passed. Too little too late most of the time, but still…
There’s a need to reconsider and propose alternatives to the existing format of presenting contemporary choreography. To come up with a new model which allows for, and incentivizes multiple viewings of works, as a way to evolve and deepen the readership into choreographic works, individual artists, and the choreographic art form as a whole.
