- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 November 2000 01.35 GMT
On stage, dance becomes a hybrid art, incorporating music, costume and design into its final product, thus making the art form especially receptive to shifts in the general culture. Evidence of dumbing down in the external world would probably therefore become immediately obvious on the dance stage. Certainly a checklist made of changes in the art form over the last 50 years would reveal a widening embrace of popular music and street fashion. It would show the effect of video and advertising techniques on the look and editing of choreographic material. Even within the arena of pure movement it would chart an increasingly casual flipping between different traditions, with choreographers quoting from ballet, bharata natyam or break dance within a single work.
So thoroughly has dance absorbed the contemporary cultural mix that academic distinctions between classical and modern, street and serious are often impossible to apply. Dance has always been dextrous in its thefts and borrowings, and is doing this more obviously as the culture speeds up.
There are, though, distinctions to be made between ballet and modern dance. The latter (initially developed in opposition to the academic discipline of ballet) came late to Britain and it wasn't until the late 60s that British dancers and choreographers started to follow the lead of American pioneers such as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham - throwing off their ballet shoes, freeing up their bodies and embracing big ideas.
The UK is now recognised as one of the world's most volatile arenas of new dance, and its audiences have become incredibly sophisticated, and incredibly hardworking. Over the last 20 years, this audience has learned to absorb a dense weave of ideas, images, emotions and cultural reference points without relying on verbal narrative or clues. It is an audience with stamina, curiosity and alertness. Yet, signicantly, it is mainly composed of 20-40-year-olds - a group allegedly with the attention span of a gnat.
When new modern dance is bad it is not usually because it is dumb but because it is impenetrable - but with ballet the issues are very different. In the 19th century, ballet, like opera, flourished on the strength of its own vigorous dumbing down, with choreographers mixing the pure aesthetics of classical dance with pretty chorus girls, flying wires and grandiose spectacle. For ballet companies today, one of the big challenges is to preserve both the purity and the vigour of its classics. Because there is a perceived canon at stake, the ballet world is often viciously at odds over how this should be done. One of the most vexed issues is training and performance, for while everyone agrees that superballerinas like Darcey Bussell and Sylvie Guillem move with a power that eclipses the technique of Margot Fonteyn and her peers, some critics argue that their athleticism has been acquired at the expense of subtler qualities such as musicality and dramatic nuance.
In the creation of new ballets, the most depressing tendency is less a move to dumbing down, than damping down. Ballet audiences are historically more conservative than the public for modern dance, and because ballet productions are expensive to create there is a tendency for companies to court the box office with works which either timidly recycle old models or else peg their choreography to familiar scores or titles. There have been distinguished and subversive exceptions however - the harrowing dance dramas of Kenneth MacMillan and the witty formal experiments of William Forsythe and Ashley Page have all prevented ballet dancers and their audience from sinking into cosy inertia. Purists may squeal that ballet has gone whoring after youth culture but it is actually doing what it has always done to survive - taking what it needs from the world outside the ballet studio and, through the alchemy of its own disciplines and traditions, creating something new.
