From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Ballet? Never Heard of It.
The decline and near-disappearance of dance in America.
NEW YORK--Thirty-two million Americans tuned in the other night to see Emmitt Smith, formerly of the Dallas Cowboys, win the Cheesetastic Disco Ball Trophy on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars." The network claims that the latest episodes of its primetime ballroom-dancing competition were the most widely viewed programs of the current TV season. That's an impressive statistic no matter how you slice it, but it's noteworthy for another, grimmer reason: If you want to see dance on TV, "Dancing With the Stars" is pretty much all there is.
Things were different in the "60s and "70s, when Edward Villella would fly through the air on "The Ed Sullivan Show" one week and swap one-liners with Tony Randall on "The Odd Couple" the next. Those were the days of the "dance boom," the heady interlude when America was dance-crazy. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Jerome Robbins, Broadway's hottest musical-comedy director, made popular ballets like "Dances at a Gathering" on the side. Even George Balanchine was a celebrity, thanks in part to "Dance in America," the PBS series that introduced a generation of TV viewers to ballet and modern dance.
Back then, dance was the most glamorous of the lively arts. Now it's the one most in danger of slipping through the cultural cracks. New episodes of "Dance in America" are as rare as funny sitcoms. Mr. Baryshnikov was the last classical dancer to become famous, and he stopped appearing in ballet years ago. As for Balanchine, how many Americans under the age of 40 even know the name of the greatest choreographer of the 20th century, much less that he was as significant an artist as Pablo Picasso or Igor Stravinsky?
Don't take my word for it. According to the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, conducted every 10 years by the National Endowment for the Arts, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 35 who attended one or more ballet performances a year fell from 5.0% in 1992 to 3.1% in 2002. That's a huge drop in a small number, and everybody in the business offers a different reason for why it shrank so fast:
• Not only has dance vanished from American TV, but newspapers and magazines have cut back on dance-related news stories and reviews.
• The quality of new choreography has fallen off significantly.
• Swan Lake"-style classical ballet, with its tutus and Tchaikovsky, is "irrelevant" to today's young people.
All these theories deserve to be taken seriously (though some are more serious than others). But I wonder whether there might not also be a more far-reaching reason for the dance bust. Consider this: Of the 120 American dance companies that received grants from the NEA in 1986, 50% are no longer in existence, among them such noted ensembles as Alwin Nikolais Dance Company, Chicago City Ballet, the Cleveland Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Feld Ballet, the Oakland Ballet Company and Twyla Tharp Dance. Most of America's major museums and symphony orchestras, by contrast, have been in business for roughly a century--but only three American ballet companies, American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, were founded prior to 1950.
What makes dance companies so fundamentally unstable by comparison with other arts institutions? One problem is that classical dance is a comparatively young art form that lacks a universally recognized canon of crowd-pleasing classics. An art museum can always fill its coffers by trotting out the Rembrandts or Monets, the same way that symphony orchestras and theater companies can count on Beethoven and Shakespeare to save the day. But outside of "Swan Lake," "The Nutcracker," "Sleeping Beauty," "Giselle" and "Romeo and Juliet," there are no "classic" dances, at least not in the sense that we think of Beethoven's Fifth or "La Boheme" as classic. Most of the greatest ballets and modern dances were made in the second half of the 20th century, and none is known by name to more than a comparatively small number of committed dance buffs.
It's not that there's anything wrong with the classics of 20th-century dance. If you've seen "Dances at a Gathering," Balanchine's "Four Temperaments," Martha Graham's "Appalachian Spring," Mark Morris' "Gloria" or Paul Taylor's "Company B" (to pick five great American dances at random), you know that ballet and modern dance can be every bit as passionate and powerful as "King Lear" or "Don Giovanni." But now that the mass media have largely stopped paying attention to high culture, the art-loving public is increasingly unaware of the existence of these masterpieces.
That's why the dance boom went bust. No classics, no stars, only a handful of long-lived institutions . . . so why take a chance on dance? And therein lies the challenge of reviving dance in America: Anyone who seeks to launch a new company, or revitalize an old one, must start by figuring out how to make large numbers of Americans want to see something about which they no longer know anything--save that Emmitt Smith does it.
Mr. Teachout, The Wall Street Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.
