At a colleague’s suggestion, yesterday I signed up for Thomas Cott‘s daily email digest of news you can use. It was waiting in my inbox this morning right on schedule, and the very top item blew my mind:
Blogging about the process of choreography – ugh!
Posted by editor-in-chief Wendy Perron on Dance Magazine’s blog, July 26, 2010
There’s an annoying new trend of blogging about the process of making a dance. I am talking about young choreographers, anxious to be in the public eye, who think that writing about what happened that day in the studio will somehow 1) bring them a wider audience and/or 2) make them a better choreographer. I realize a blog is a good way to keep your website alive and to involve your potential audience. But explaining how you make a dance, the problems you encounter and how you solve them, is not going to help either you as the choreographer or your potential audience.
This struck me a really odd position to take in our Facebookified Twitterverse, so I was super curious to find out how the dance community responded to this post. Alas it does not appear that Dance Magazine allows comments, though a few readers have published blog posts re: on separate sites. Perron’s original post is worth reading in full, as in it she gets deeper into specifics on exactly why she worries about this reliance on words when it comes to creating fresh art. Her thoughts were really interesting to me, particularly because she’s cautioning young artists to pull in the reigns and that’s not a message I come across very often. Usually it’s about how to be more, do more, and say more, all in the hope of reaching more, teaching more, and selling more.
So, to blog or not to blog about process, that is an interesting question in the messy rule-breaking world of creative expression. Did Perron intend this as dance-specific advice, particularly needed due to its physical nature? How important is the “pre-verbal place” in other types of creative work? I personally thought Perron’s admonishment to knock the blogging off was a little harsh, but the seemingly always-distracted-by-blinking-technology side of me understands that she has a point. It was a point that was only amplified later in the day by Paul Graham’s piece on cigarettes, heroin, crack, and Facebook.
I couldn’t agree with Wendy more. Don’t talk about making a non-talking art, make art and let the conversation flow from there.
If Wendy doesn’t think we should be talking so much about art why is she talking so much about art?
Are verbal expressions of creativity and non-verbal expressions of creativity somehow mutually exclusive?
[Amusingly the ReCAPTCHA code I had to type with this comment was “colossus containment.” Is that the real danger of blogging your development, that ideas are exposed to potential criticism too early?]
In my experience in NYC (I’m in Houston now) mainstream press coverage of the city’s dance community was sorely lacking. Given the number of dancers in that city, it’s just ridiculous how much space is given over to movies and TV in the NY Times and how little was left for dance. And what’s worse, I believe this lack of writing keeps much of the music and dance community equally ignorant of the other. I scored several evening length works for dance, and I was an anomaly in New York. Dancers absolutely love and consume music, but how music is created and at what cost is not something they generally understand (same goes for musicians when it comes to dancers).
So the pull-quote you provided that scolds choreographers – especially “young” choreographers – about blogging about process and the day-to-day of keeping a company together seems ridiculous to me. Why not offer via the Internet an alternative to the mainstream superstructure in place that willfully ignores creative people? One reason I now write about Houston’s musical culture is that I want to READ about it. And if I’m not seeing the coverage I want, I will do it myself.
HOWEVER – and this is a big “howeverâ€â€¦one of many things I admire about many of the dancers I call my friends is their respect for process and the sacred nature of what they did. i.e. They don’t feel compelled to blab on twitter every 30 seconds about what they were doing, eating, etc. And many were uncompromising with their work and did not pander to audiences. They are in New York for its culture and community. Not to get their one minute of fame. I am reminded of Joseph Cornell’s life and diaries and in fact was just reading them on the bus to work today…There is something really powerful about keeping things secret, close to your chest, etc. and doing so can lead to a stronger piece of work.