Dance may be confusing and pretentious, but televised dance competitions are making the art form more popular than ever. Perhaps other fine arts should follow suit?
Dance—especially the really artsy kind—can be the most confusing and inscrutable of the major art forms. But dance has done surprisingly well in our age of file sharing and digital media—mainly due to the added element of competition. As a genre, competitive dance is evidently appealing enough to support four or five big movies a year, along with about a half-dozen extremely popular TV shows.
The evolution of dance from a means of expression into a spectator sport has made it something we can all understand—and a staple of mainstream culture. If that sounds like “dumbing down,” well, that’s probably true. But it’s no betrayal of the art.
The art is still in there. But framing dance as a battle just taps into one surefire, hard-wired way human beings have of understanding the world, from sports to politics to choosing a computer operating system.
If you approach competitive dance as a nonviolent means of resolving conflicts and a gateway drug to fine art, it starts to look like an almost utopian influence on the world.
If anything, the explosion of dance-based entertainment is probably a sign that somebody ought to be developing America’s Best String Quartet or So You Think You’re an Abstract Expressionist (and, let’s be honest, somebody probably already is).
Not everybody can immediately appreciate when they’ve been exposed to some enlightened form of artistic expression. For the longest time, I thought Beethoven’s Ode to Joy was written for the Die Hard soundtrack. It can be even tougher to understand what’s going on if the high art comes via the complex language of movement. By contrast, it’s hard to miss it when you’ve been “served.”
