We asked our dancers in a sense to dance their prayer. Your neurotransmitters are basically the same whether you're davening or meditating or onstage. What was the spiritual investment, the payoff, for them? We started to reflect a little about the spirituality, the prayer of performance, the prayer of long-distance running. Here were a lot of people who spent their lives working for not a lot of money. ''So we immediately realized we had to find some way of touching them emotionally. ''Does prayer make you move or movement induce prayer?'' Mr. Next they read ''The Joys of Yiddish,'' the cabala and Isaac Bashevis Singer's ''Satan in Goray.'' The title of the dance, the Yiddish word for prayer, also suggests the ritualist rocking of the body during Jewish prayer. ''Davenen'' had grown out of their desire to ''jump around and do something fun to klezmer music,'' Mr. Wolken said of the piece, which was commissioned by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. ''She was the only one who responded like this,'' Mr.
The dance was peopled by ''brutes, perverts and demented worshipers,'' she wrote, with the men wearing striped pajamalike pants similar to those worn in concentration camps. Weiss wrote, the choreographers evoked the ''current chaos'' in Israel through an emphasis on the ferocity of Old Testament stories and created a limited picture of Jewish life. They were added after Hedy Weiss, dance critic for The Chicago Sun Times, described ''Davenen'' as offensive, anti-Semitic and ''a dangerous act.'' The notes are essentially meditations on the act of praying. In the case of the Pilobolus program notes, the intention was to forestall misinterpretation. I don't know if audience education does educate them, but I think audiences have a certain interest in it.'' ''Unfortunately, people want something to hold on to, some help in knowing what to think. They have an ambiguity that is their most divine quality. ''You don't want to understand a poem or poetic thing the way you understand things that are prosaic. ''A dance is the best explanation of itself,'' said Eliot Feld, whose Ballet Tech company is to perform at the Joyce in early August. Are program notes or any other kind of education necessary? In the meantime no dance seems to go unexplained.
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Like other performing arts, dance is sharpening its marketing skills. Now the needs of the most grizzled dancegoers are attended to with everything from pre- and post-performance talks to lively information-age Web sites complete with dance-related games.
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The education of audiences has become an industry.Įarly programs sent dancers out into the schools to rear the audiences of the future. Audiences grew and had to keep growing to support newly expanding organizations and shrinking financial support. With the boom of the 1970's and 80's, dance horizons expanded. Unlike incorporeal music, dance is tantalizingly close to recognizable narrative.
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Gestures tend not to have encoded meanings, as nervous new dance audiences sometimes worry. Plots, if they exist at all, are communicated not through words but through movement. But simply their existence says something about the relatively new phenomenon of making an audience-friendly art of dance.ĭance is essentially an art of metaphor. More evocative than descriptive, the program additions are not the traditional explications of narrative that once accompanied all story ballet programs. The notes were written in response to a charge of anti-Semitism made by a Chicago dance critic against the two choreographers. But audiences at the Joyce Theater, where Pilobolus is performing through July 28, will find not one but two substantial notes accompanying the credits for ''Davenen,'' a new piece by Robby Barnett and Jonathan Wolken that explores the nature of prayer. The company tends to let its freewheeling, often surrealistic dances stand on their own. The Pilobolus Dance Theater is not known for its program notes.