Dance War
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TONY SCHULTZ |
Two titans, two teams, one battle…this is DANCE WAR!
The trailer to ABC’s new gladiator spectacular tells us that “talk is cheap.” So to settle their rivalry “Dancing with the Stars” judges Bruno Tonioli and Carrie Ann Inaba “put their money where there mouth is” and battle two armies of dancers against each other. The casualties of this conflict are not the titans but the unfortunate dancers America decides to vote off each week.
Dance makes for good wars and wars make for good entertainment. As vulgar as all this sounds it is important that we try to develop the thinking around this little cultural treasure. We love a good battle dance. Is it not the battle between the Montagues and Capulets that becomes the centerpiece of Romeo and Juliet. See Kristin’s video on battle training here. Indeed Dance of the Knights, Prokofiev’s score for the battle scene in Act I, Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, becomes the sonic theme for the whole ballet.
We have looked at the close relationship between the making a military body and making a dancer before. In our discussions of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Arbeau’s dance manual we have seen the science of choreography as a general problem to be employed for developing military maneuvers and dance maneuvers alike.
In politics, business and the culture at large war is arguably the eminent form or discourse. It makes sense then that contemporary dance should investigate this form a bit more deeply. Though the work is valuble I am not talking about making dances about conflict, such as David Dorfman’s Underground or William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies. Rather I am looking at dances that are themselves conflicts such as the battle format in breakdancing. If we were to look at professional wrestling as a performance practice it too would fall into this category.
Perhaps we should have performances in which two dance companies compete against each other and the audience, voting on their cell phones, determines which gets to keep the box office. I would definitely go see that show. It will be exciting to explore the dance war as a valuble performance outlet to be experimented with.
