| |
  
Quel avenir pour la danse en
Angleterre ?
Val Bourne, après 28 ans à
la direction artistique de Dance Umbrella, quittera sous
peu ses fonctions à la tête de cet important
festival de danse contemporaine de Londres. Elle confie
ses inquiétudes quant à l’avenir de
la danse en Angleterre à Debra Craine, journaliste
au Times.
Can the Umbrella weather
the storm?
As Val Bourne, the driving force behind
Dance Umbrella, retires, she tells us why she fears for
the future of dance in Britain.
On Sunday night the dance world will celebrate a true one-off.
For 28 years Val Bourne, indefatigable and indomitable,
has been the most constant figure in British dance. She
has widened our horizons and shaped our taste in ways we
didn’t even know we wanted. Like a terrier she has
fought for contemporary dance, and like a mother hen she
has nurtured some of its most important creators. As artistic
director of Dance Umbrella, London’s annual festival
of contemporary dance, Bourne has inspired, entertained
— and, yes, infuriated — decades of dancegoers.
She has cajoled us into watching a
man barbecue meat on the stage of the ICA — one of
Umbrella’s more outrageous moments — and thrilled
us with the glories of Mark Morris choreographing Handel
at the Coliseum. Twenty-eight years ago, when she started,
they said a dance festival that eschewed tutus and tiaras
would never work in London, but this feisty former dancer
proved them wrong. |
 |
Since 1978 she has programmed more
than 1,500 performances by more than 300 companies and artists
from 21 countries in 33 venues. She has promoted an entire
generation of British-based choreographers and introduced
a huge range of foreign companies to Britain. Probably no
one, anywhere, knows more about contemporary dance.
Now, as she slips gracefully into
retirement at the age of 67, the dance world prepares to
mark her enormous contribution with a gala at Sadler’s
Wells. Umbrella favourites such as Mark Morris, Michael
Clark and Richard Alston will gather to pay tribute in an
evening of dance hosted by Richard Move, the wickedly funny
Martha Graham impersonator. It will be smiles all round
on the night, and why not? They won’t just be honouring
a much-loved figure, they will also be welcoming her successor,
Betsy Gregory, and raising a glass to Umbrella’s rosy
future.
But how rosy is that future going to be? Audiences are expanding,
venues are opening up, and contemporary dance is thriving
as a seedbed for new ideas in the theatre. Independent choreographers
used to working with a budget of nothing are now working
for Kylie Minogue and on the West End. But Bourne, who has
spent her life making sure dance happens, sees a hurricane
on the horizon.
“It’s a fantastic time to be working in dance,
but we shouldn’t kid ourselves,” she says. “It
may look vigorous, but dance is not deeply rooted enough
in our culture, like music, theatre or literature. We are
very vulnerable.”
For Bourne, the storm clouds gathered when Tony Blair took
office. “If you took a snapshot of dance today it’s
very healthy, but it’s healthy because of what went
before. We have supported a lot of artists over the years
and we are seeing the benefit of that now. Things began
to change when it became the Department for Culture, Media
and Sport and when Tony Blair started inviting the Spice
Girls and footballers to Downing Street. That was a revealing
moment, the moment when culture was redefined. It’s
not really about dumbing down, it’s a case of putting
things in the pot which don’t really belong together
and making a bad stew.”
And a bad situation is only getting worse, thanks
to the two fatal P words of arts funding — philistinism
and politically correct thinking. “Dance is
now seen as a social sticking plaster,” Bourne
says. “So that working with minorities and the
disadvantaged, be it physically or socially, seems
to be central to what we do. Channel 4’s Ballet
Hoo! is great, that these disaffected teenagers should
have had a chance to do something as wonderful as
that, but that’s what dance is now seen to be.
The fact that it’s high art has been sidelined.”
 |
Check out the Arts Council England
website, which emphasises the health benefits of dance above
all else, and you begin to see how right she is. “We’ve
been told that because there is so much obesity little girls
and boys can do dance classes as a way of losing weight.
Well, that’s all great but it’s a by-product
of dance, it’s not what the arts are there for. But
it’s what this Government thinks the arts are there
for.” |
At a time when British choreography
is the envy of the world, those who make dances here, including
some of Umbrella’s most celebrated artists, are finding
it harder and harder to get public funding. “We are
all being pushed into ticking the right boxes, and if you
are white, middle-class and middle-aged you are not ticking
anything. Take someone like Russell Maliphant. The French
can’t believe that Russell doesn’t have regular
funding. But he’s disadvantaged because he’s
a white, middle-class, middle-aged choreographer.”
Michael Clark, whose Stravinsky Project at the Barbican
this week is one of the highlights of this year’s
festival, is another example of Britain turning its back
on one of its most talented creative spirits. “Michael’s
three-year funding from the Barbican comes to an end next
year, and the Arts Council has made it abundantly clear
that there’s nothing there for him.” Clark,
the former punk prince of British dance, is now a sedate
44.
“Contemporary dance has always
been thought of as the prerogative and playground of young
people. You cut your teeth in contemporary dance and then
you get over it and make pieces for ballet companies —
that was the feeling. So no provision has been made for
those who might be going on beyond their twenties and thirties
to carve out a career in contemporary dance. People like
Michael Clark and Jonathan Burrows. Yet if you look at the
ages of the choreographers in this year’s Umbrella
you will see that two-thirds of them are over 40. Nobody
made provision for that whole generation, and those choreographers
who didn’t cross the line into regular public funding
five years ago are not going to make it now.
“I don’t know who to blame. We were the model
for funding dance; that’s the terrible thing. Now
we’re following the US model because essentially we’re
both philistine countries. But American funding dried up
five years ago and now there’s nothing there. If we
go down that route it would be very sad.”
If the vagaries of funding send Bourne into a spin, the
subject of ticket prices makes her see red. “The theatres
are being forced to yank up their prices, and the one thing
that will compound the idea that dance is an elitist form
is high ticket prices. When Umbrella started we could set
up a stall in the student union and tell people: ‘It’s
new, you’ll like it.’ And they would buy tickets.
Not any more. Students today owe so much money that they
want a guarantee of perfection before they buy. This isn’t
Swan Lake, people don’t know what they are getting.
Contemporary dance is about something new, and that makes
it harder to attract audiences. But we’re in danger
of alienating the young by putting dance beyond their means.”
So much has happened to dance since Umbrella began. Major
venues, such as Sadler’s Wells, the South Bank and
the Barbican, have opened their doors to the festival. Audience
perceptions have changed too, with people no longer afraid
that a night of contemporary dance means people rolling
around on the floor in baggy costumes. And as the very definition
of dance has changed to embrace just about anything that
moves (and some things that don’t), so too has the
art form become bolder in presenting itself. Merce Cunningham’s
company making dance magic in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern;
Stephan Koplowitz’s innovative Genesis Canyon taking
over the Natural History Museum: these are prime examples
of Bourne’s vision in taking dance outside its theatrical
borders.
Gregory, of course, may choose to go down a completely different
road, perhaps preferring to nurture more new artists and
leaving some of the more established ones to fend for themselves.
But whatever happens, Bourne is in no doubt that dance needs
Umbrella.
“The festival is an act of faith,” she says.
“These are threatening times. There is some very good
work out there and no political will to support it. A festival
like this makes a convincing argument for a body of work
that is incredibly diverse. It tells people that they are
going on a journey which celebrates dance in all its forms.”
Source :
Debra Craine
The Times
October 30, 2006
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,585-2425882,00.html
Retourner
au sommaire du numéro de novembre 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
|
|
|
