I always enjoy the "Advice for Dancers" column in Dance Magazine. Reading about the problems of artists in the ballet and show biz sectors offers an interesting window on life beyond the Dance Exchange's sometimes contrarian corner of the dance world. In the just-released November edition, a reader asks: "My friend is working for a Tony Award-winning choreographer who screams and throws chairs -- isn't it illegal to treat company members this way?"
This reminded me of a story I recently heard about a now-deceased big-name choreographer. "Treat your dancers like s***," he advised a younger colleague (my informant, actually). "That way you'll always get what you want from them."
Sad.
Putting the two stories together did make me wonder: Is there a school of thought in the dance world that holds that fear, intimidation, and abuse are effective means for getting good performances from dancers? Is it just temperament that accounts for the screaming-and-throwing-chairs approach to dancemaking, or is it a kind of learned (and taught) behavior? And when choreography is imparted as a discipline, how often are the relational, communicative aspects of the dancer-choreographer dynamic included in the curriculum?
Since my education in dance is pretty much limited to Dance Exchange, I can't answer these questions in reference to dance-at-large. But I suspect that choreographic technique rarely encompasses how to relate to your dancers, and choreographers end up emulating whatever behaviors -- good, bad, or indifferent -- were perpetrated on them when they were dancers.
I'd like to believe that whether a choreographer favors a nurturing or a tough-minded approach, respect is always a basic value in how artists are treated. And I can't help but wonder if more could be done to teach good communication and leadership to emerging dancemakers.
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Certainly there are choreographers/directors/performers who are simply badly behaved. But I've also had significant experience with what I would term the Eastern-influenced school of performance thought (think martial-arts, think yoga, think Grotowski and Andre Gregory) that operates more on the principle that humans must be winnowed down into artists; that the layers and masks REQUIRE the harshest treatment for removal, and it is only once those layers are peeled away that true art (the human soul) can be exposed.
This might be the other end of a spectrum, then, of the perception of artist as person-fully-enlarged.
Of the many things I could say about this dichotomy, for the moment I'll limit myself to the observation that the stripping-away method tends to create artists who are deeply dependent on a visionary director/choreographer/leader, while the enlarging method tends to create artists with more tools for self-sufficiency...I think.
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