Yale, what would Balanchine say?

BY GEORGINA CULLMAN

HYURA CHOI/YH

But my life is not just style; whatever my motivations may really be (and G-d bless the person who can figure that one out), these causes/dying breeds are still inherently worthwhile and deserve our attention.

One of these things that I hold dear is dance. No, not what you do at Toad's, if you choose to brave the place on a Saturday night. I mean the art form that Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, José Limon, Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Lester Horton, Ruth St. Denis, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins, Isadora Duncan and others have worked in. Many people may never have heard of most of these artists. Well, they're the icons, the innovators of the field. And the majority of them are American. Which makes it all the worse that most American folks don't even know who they are. It's like not knowing who Miles Davis is, or Jackson Pollock.

These choreographers' lack of name recognition wouldn't bother me if this ignorance didn't reflect a more generalized alienation from the artform. Let me explain. I took FormAC the spring of my freshman year. In one lecture, Professor Matthew Jacobson showed a clip from a Martha Graham piece. I watched the selection and was surprised at the obviousness of Graham's message. All the dancers moved in synchrony, using mechanical gestures. They moved like automatons, apparently without any individual agency. Graham was clearly lamenting the increasing impersonality of the modern world, and decrying the commodification of humans. Others in the class, however, were not able to read the dance at all.

So great was their confusion that Jacobson chose to show the clip again the next day—after explicating the piece and telling people what to look for. What was so obscure to my fellow classmates? I know that my background in dance helped me recognize the machine-like quality of the movement in Graham's choreography, that it allowed me to uncover the techniques with which Graham made her argument.

I suppose that I shouldn't expect Yalies to be conversant with dance when the college only offered one class in dance history this year—taught by a visiting professor no less. I wonder if we would be as uncomfortable with the visual arts if Yale had no program in the History of Art.

I do know that this distance from the artform means that most people are reluctant to see dance performances, which translates into poor funding for dance and its increased marginalization.

Well, for some kinds of dance. The bubble-gum brand of pop dance popularized by the likes of Britney and the Backstreet Boys is so mainstream that you can't escape it, whether you're watching MTV or ABC. While I hope that dance will have a renaissance in the near future, I would have to give up liking modern dance if it graced the small screen on a regular basis in the same way as the Britney strut does now. I wouldn't be fighting for the underdog anymore. 

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