BWW Blog: Stephen Campanella - An Open Mind and the Avant-Garde

In my last blog, I commented on variety in the repertory of a ballet company and placed a special emphasis on the preservation of older ballets and the importance of exposure to a variety of dance. I felt it appropriate to follow up this week with a double theme on the importance of having an open mind when watching dance and on the nature of the avant-garde.

What constitutes an open mind? To be open-minded does not mean you should like everything. To be open-minded is to be willing to go experience something new and not pass judgment upon it until you have had time to make a fully informed decision. However, you must not be afraid to form an opinion, positive or negative. As a corollary, you must acknowledge that good and bad are not necessarily dependent upon your likes and dislikes. I dislike Paradise Lost, but it is one of the most incredible pieces of English literature. My dislike does not mean the work is bad. In contrast, there are those guilty pleasures - works that we all like despite a lack of quality or substance. Therefore, you must also be open to accepting the tastes of others, even while reserving the right to think what you will of a given ballet.

Making up your mind about a piece involves both the head and the heart; you must analyze both the piece itself and your reaction to it. Art should speak to those who experience it, so think of what it said to you. On the intellectual side, there are three questions that I have heard attributed in various forms to various critics: What was the purpose of the piece? Did the piece accomplish it? Was it worth accomplishing? Those are good places to start, leaving aside the argument as to whether a piece needs a purpose or not. These questions should also give you a more objective idea of the quality of the piece. Then of course there is your visceral reaction. How did the piece make you feel? Whatever reaction the work in question provoked should go a long way to answering the much more subjective question of whether you liked it or not. Using these first thoughts as a base it becomes possible to further analyze the work by asking why the piece had whatever impact it did on you and by looking at how the choreographer achieved that effect. Thinking of a ballet in this way makes it easier not to judge prematurely as well as to keep balance in your opinion, separating the subjective and the objective.

It is very nice to know what an open mind is, and how to keep it that way when watching dance, but it would be perfectly fair to ask why you should bother. You are certainly under absolutely no obligation to do so, but there are benefits for both a dancer and a dance aficionado. First, like I said in my last blog, you cannot know if you will like something or not until you have experienced it. For the dance lover, the best case scenario is that you found your tastes and assumptions about dance challenged and ended up loving something you never thought you would. The worst case scenario is that you learn a little bit more about the limits of what you can tolerate seeing, and you have great material for at least one sarcastic conversation with friends. For the dancer, the more open you are to different kinds of work, the easier it is to get a job. It increases the number of companies for which you can audition, and the more you audition the more likely you are to get a job. It also makes you more valuable to a director if you are open to whatever variety of styles the company has in its repertory, and open to the specific details of the company look, even if they are at odds with your training or taste. Besides, it makes life considerably more pleasant if you wait as long as possible to decide if you hate a ballet you have to perform.

All of this is necessary before moving on to a discussion of the avant-garde because it is especially vital to keep an open mind when watching ballets of that type. People are more likely to be close-minded to avant-garde work (although I have come across those who reject all classical work as outdated) because of its nature. After all, a ballet that has been around for a century or so has usually survived for a good reason, so there is an automatic presumption that it is good, even if one does not necessarily like it, whereas a new work is a crapshoot. Indeed, the nature of avant-garde work is to challenge the preconceived ideas of the audience and push dance, if not in a direction that it has never gone, at least further or more radically in that direction than it has gone before. It is thus most important not to prejudge an avant-garde work exactly because it is intended to make you question your preconceptions; hence the importance of keeping an open mind and analyzing the work objectively before doing so subjectively.

Identifying what constitutes an avant-garde work can also be difficult, as the notion of avant-garde is fluid. I said in my previous blog what is new becomes old, so what is avant-garde to one generation is normal to the next. A choreographer's work is cutting edge when that choreographer has a vision that is avant-garde. This is what pushes ballet, all dance, all art, forward. A choreographer without such a vision who wishes to be cutting edge and tries to achieve this by imitating those who are is not avant-garde. Instead, the imitating choreographer performs the important function of pushing the avant-garde of one generation into the mainstream of the next. This, in turn, makes room for new choreographers with new ideas. All of this results in avant-garde being in the eye of the beholder, because it is based on the individual perception of what constitutes dance. Therefore, deciding what is or is not avant-garde is almost as subjective as deciding whether you like a work or not. There is no universal formula for solving this question, and plenty of dancers, choreographers, and directors that I know have very different opinions on what constitutes the avant-garde. Objectively, it is probably best to first determine what is standard in the dance world at a given time by watching as great a variety of work as possible, and then decide if the particular ballet you are watching challenges this standard or not. Subjectively, you must, as I have said, ask yourself if the work causes you to question your opinions of what dance can be.

Having just given so much advice, I want to say that you do not have to follow a bit of it. You do not have to keep an open mind. You do not have to analyze what you are watching. You do not have to watch what is happening in the dance world and form an opinion about what is standard and what is cutting edge at a given time. You can simply go, and sit, and enjoy (or not enjoy) whatever you wish to see, and avoid anything out of the ordinary. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Nevertheless, it is only by seeing as much as possible and by forming a balanced opinion that you are able to discover your personal limits of enjoyment and interest. For a dancer, to dance is to push one's physical limits as far as possible, and then a little farther. As a dance lover, why not push your ideological limits with the works you see? You may find yourself unexpectedly enthralled.

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