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La danse
en déclin aux États-Unis
Selon un sondage effectué tous les dix ans par
le National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), le pourcentage
des Américains qui ont assisté à un
spectacle de danse classique a chuté de 5 % à 3,1
% entre 1992 et 2002. Fait inquiétant : des
120 compagnies de danse qui recevaient un financement de
la NEA en 1986, près de 50 % sont disparues aujourd’hui,
que l’on pense aux Alwin Nikolais Dance Company,
Dance Theatre of Harlem, Twyla Tharp Dance,… Un
portrait sombre de la danse chez nos voisins du Sud publié dans
le Wall Street Journal.
Ballet? Never Heard of It.
The decline and near-disappearance of dance in America.
NEW YORK--Thirty-two million Americans tuned in the other
night to see Emmitt Smith, formerly of the Dallas Cowboys,
win the Cheesetastic Disco Ball Trophy on ABC's "Dancing
With the Stars." The network claims that the latest
episodes of its primetime ballroom-dancing competition
were the most widely viewed programs of the current TV
season. That's an impressive statistic no matter how you
slice it, but it's noteworthy for another, grimmer reason:
If you want to see dance on TV, "Dancing With the
Stars" is pretty much all there is.
Things were different
in the "60s and "70s,
when Edward Villella would fly through the air on "The
Ed Sullivan Show" one week and swap one-liners with
Tony Randall on "The Odd Couple" the next. Those
were the days of the "dance boom," the heady
interlude when America was dance-crazy. Mikhail Baryshnikov
and Rudolf Nureyev appeared on the cover of Time magazine.
Jerome Robbins, Broadway's hottest musical-comedy director,
made popular ballets like "Dances at a Gathering" on
the side. Even George Balanchine was a celebrity, thanks
in part to "Dance in America," the PBS series
that introduced a generation of TV viewers to ballet and
modern dance.
Back then, dance was the most glamorous of
the lively arts. Now it's the one most in danger of slipping
through the cultural cracks. New episodes of "Dance
in America" are
as rare as funny sitcoms. Mr. Baryshnikov was the last
classical dancer to become famous, and he stopped appearing
in ballet years ago. As for Balanchine, how many Americans
under the age of 40 even know the name of the greatest
choreographer of the 20th century, much less that he was
as significant an artist as Pablo Picasso or Igor Stravinsky?
Don't
take my word for it. According to the Survey of Public
Participation in the Arts, conducted every 10 years by
the National Endowment for the Arts, the percentage of
Americans between the ages of 18 and 35 who attended one
or more ballet performances a year fell from 5.0% in 1992
to 3.1% in 2002. That's a huge drop in a small number,
and everybody in the business offers a different reason
for why it shrank so fast:
• Not only has dance vanished
from American TV, but newspapers and magazines have cut
back on dance-related news stories and reviews.
• The
quality of new choreography has fallen off significantly.
• Swan
Lake"-style classical ballet, with its
tutus and Tchaikovsky, is "irrelevant" to today's
young people.
All these theories deserve to be taken seriously
(though some are more serious than others). But I wonder
whether there might not also be a more far-reaching reason
for the dance bust. Consider this: Of the 120 American
dance companies that received grants from the NEA in 1986,
50% are no longer in existence, among them such noted ensembles
as Alwin Nikolais Dance Company, Chicago City Ballet, the
Cleveland Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Feld Ballet,
the Oakland Ballet Company and Twyla Tharp Dance. Most
of America's major museums and symphony orchestras, by
contrast, have been in business for roughly a century--but
only three American ballet companies, American Ballet Theater,
New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, were founded
prior to 1950.
What makes dance companies so fundamentally
unstable by comparison with other arts institutions? One
problem is that classical dance is a comparatively young
art form that lacks a universally recognized canon of crowd-pleasing
classics. An art museum can always fill its coffers by
trotting out the Rembrandts or Monets, the same way that
symphony orchestras and theater companies can count on
Beethoven and Shakespeare to save the day. But outside
of "Swan Lake," "The Nutcracker," "Sleeping
Beauty," "Giselle" and "Romeo and Juliet," there
are no "classic" dances, at least not in the
sense that we think of Beethoven's Fifth or "La Boheme" as
classic. Most of the greatest ballets and modern dances
were made in the second half of the 20th century, and none
is known by name to more than a comparatively small number
of committed dance buffs.
It's not that there's anything
wrong with the classics of 20th-century dance. If you've
seen "Dances at a
Gathering," Balanchine's "Four Temperaments," Martha
Graham's "Appalachian Spring," Mark Morris' "Gloria" or
Paul Taylor's "Company B" (to pick five great
American dances at random), you know that ballet and modern
dance can be every bit as passionate and powerful as "King
Lear" or "Don Giovanni." But now that the
mass media have largely stopped paying attention to high
culture, the art-loving public is increasingly unaware
of the existence of these masterpieces.
That's why the dance
boom went bust. No classics, no stars, only a handful of
long-lived institutions . . . so why take a chance on dance?
And therein lies the challenge of reviving dance in America:
Anyone who seeks to launch a new company, or revitalize
an old one, must start by figuring out how to make large
numbers of Americans want to see something about which
they no longer know anything--save that Emmitt Smith does
it.
Mr. Teachout, The Wall Street Journal's drama critic,
writes "Sightings" every other Saturday and blogs
about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.
Source :
TERRY TEACHOUT
The Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2006
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110009307
Retourner
au sommaire du numéro de décembre 2006
© i-mouvance est édité
par le Regroupement québécois de la danse.
Les articles signés expriment l'opinion de leurs
auteurs et pas nécessairement celle du RQD.
Pour toute information : info@quebecdanse.org
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