Around 9 years ago I wrote about a response someone had gotten from the head of a dance program while trying to revive an annual dance festival.
The head of the program said he didn’t want to expose his students to our audience whom he compared to the crowd at a football game. I had followed up to see if there had been miscommunication or misunderstanding. As I wrote at the time:
He felt the audience, which is generally comprised of family and friends of the dancers, needed to be educated about how to behave. He admitted he didn’t know how that might be accomplished as lecturing folks before a performance on decorum would probably make people resentful.
Reading that, I got to wondering if that type of attitude might have changed in the nearly decade since. Given all the conversations about changing the general environment in performance halls to allow audiences to feel more actively involved and less passive, has anything changed?
This is one of those rare occasions when new audiences aren’t intimidated by the thought of disapproving looks from those more experienced and knowledgeable than themselves.
Since I am not longer working at an arts organization with a dance program or a reputation for presenting dance, I need to throw this question out to the readership. Have there been any changes?
In the situation 9 years ago, the person objecting lead a university based training program conferring graduate and undergraduate degrees. The approach such a program might take to dance is likely to be different from that of a dance company that was started by someone who received their training at Urban Dance Camp.
If you want to respond to this, give us a little context about your practice or the expectations you recently experienced.
There is also the issue that an overly boisterous environment can create an unnerving experience for people who are participating in their first public performance after having just started learning dance. Often the cheering is a much about the audience member calling attention to themselves and their connection to the performer as it is about supporting the performer.
The other question is, how do you communicate the need to keep it dialed back without offending people who are making a rare visit to a performing arts venue whom you want to see more frequently?
I don’t know about an adult dance festival but when my kids were in high school 12 or 15 years ago, there was the usual hassle of doting parents with video cameras standing in front of the audience to get the best shots. At the dance program, however, the students in the audience chattered at normal volume about their dance teachers etc, blocking out hearing the music. When I spoke to them, they were baffled that anyone would want to hear the music while dance was happening, I never went to another dance program there.
All that wasn’t exactly demonstrative, but it was surely interfering with the other families’ ability to hear the shows. I do think that the teachers could have sent letters home before each show, explaining minimal manners. It’s too late once they’re set up with cameras.