This is the first in a series of posts that will discuss the topic “Who Owns the Dance?” The series will look at publications, dance companies, the commercial side of dance, and much more.

McFadden Who?

One evening I went to check Dance Magazine’s website to do some research for Green Dancers but their site was down. So, I went to check Pointe Magazine but that site was down. Then Dance Teacher, and finally Dance Spirit, the most glitterized publication for dance, but they were all down. All the major dance publications were down, which led me to conclude that they had to be run by one entity, and I wanted to find out whom.

With a little online research, I found that all the Dance Magazine Publications as well as Dancemedia.com were run by Mcfadden Performing Arts Media. M.P.A.M. in turn is owned by a larger company called Mcfadden Communications Group; “a multi-platform company that serves various markets with magazines, websites and trade shows”. They also own a series of pet and pizza magazines, as well as American Cheerleader and Cheer Biz News and run a series of expos for grocery stores and pizza companies.

How is it that a company who owns magazines about pizza and pets holds a monopoly on almost all publications pertaining to the art of dance?

As most people know, small magazines or companies that achieve success are often bought by larger companies with more money and more resources. When this happens the quality of those products usually suffers. Many of us have seen our favorite products go from gold to scrap metal when bought by a larger company. The dumbing down of quality for quantity’s sake is definitely true with Macfadden Performing Arts Media.

Knowing this helped me to understand why Dance Magazine’s publications are at best slightly inciting and at worst cheap trash. Maybe, this is too harsh, because not every article in the magazines is bad. Underneath all the glitter and flash there can sometimes be a thought provoking moment or a beautiful photograph, but this is often too rare.

What makes the magazines appalling is not necessarily the content but the form and function. They are not selling dance as an artform, they are selling a commercialized version of dance to a demographic of 8 to 18 year olds. They clearly show this fact in a format so closely modeled after magazines like Cosmo Girl, Seventeen, Vogueteen and American Cheerleader.  Teen Dance Magazine would be a more realistic title for what they are selling.

I’m not saying don’t buy any of the Mcfadden Publications. I definitely won’t stop buying Dance Magazine. I’m just wondering where to go if we’re looking for a quality dance publication as opposed to a teeny-bopper magazine. I can read reviews in the NYTimes or previews in Time Out, but as a professional dancer I can’t find a publication that would be more like the Vogue of Dance and less like Vogueteen. The closest I’ve come to is Dance Europe, but that is difficult to get in the states and still does not address many of the issues a professional dancer is interested in.

A major reason for the absence of such a publication is that we, as a dance community, have lost our voice and along with it a lot class. We are too self-concerned and dispersed to create a coherent voice that can live and be heard in addition to the mainstream. Because of this, we allow the mainstream to control our future and our ideas.

Dancers become so involved in the physical art form that to express themselves through forms other than movement is a challenge and even thought of by many as unnecessary. Instead of thinking of ourselves as crafters of the art, we only consider ourselves the form on which to create, the canvas. In doing so, we forget the importance of the vocal part of our community which is necessary to the enhancement of the art form.

Perhaps we don’t need our own print publication. Instead, what we need is a place to come together and start communicating our ideas. A place to find and write the articles that a professional dancer wants to read because they are inspirational, informative, fun, and intriguing.

The first step in building this place is to step outside of ourselves as merely individual dancers and start concerning ourselves more with our community as a whole.

A post from Benjamin Wardell:

I love how difficult it is to capture dance.  I heard a choreographer compare dance to fireworks in that aspect.  It happens in one unique moment and then is left to our memory.  Even when doing the same choreography repeatedly, we can’t help but change the dance each time through our choices, mood, or even our mistakes.

So when it comes time to photograph dance we often come up short.  How do you take something that’s always moving and shifting and lock it into one frame?  So much dance photography ends up somehow flat and stifled.  Instead of preserving the life of a dance, it boils it down to a single moment disconnected from the whole.

So, as a dancer and photographer I’m trying to figure out how to deal with this problem.  There is a central similarity between photography and dance in that they are both very concerned with the relationship of positions to movement.  But in that similarity there can be a disconnect, because photography is often about finding movement in one position and dance is basically about taking many positions and creating movement through them.  Lately, my favorite dance photography finds moments that are only possible when dance and photography come together.  Photos where the camera isn’t just capturing a moment but is opening up possibilities for the dance that cannot exist anywhere except on the film and in the frame.  The photo below is a beautiful example.  It creates a world that is unlike the reality of what it’s capturing, but somewhere in that unreality it finds the essence and maintains the life of the dance work.  That inexplicable place where the two mediums meet is the place I’m always striving to find when I get behind my camera.

I thought about how Twitter has caught on fire when the opening announcement of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s performance stated, “Please turn off your cell phone.  Text messaging and Tweeting are distracting to the performers and to those around you.”

The phenomenon of Tweeting is something that the rest of the world has made an everyday part of their virtual world of communication but is an oddity to most dancers and dance companies. Why are we so behind?

When I first heard the word Twitter, I was completely uninterested because it seemed to be a huge gossip network for people with too much time on their hands. Who cares if someone in the grocery store buys 10 dozen twinkies or if someone on the pot looks down and sees Mother Mary with child staring back at them?

But then I began to rethink what Twitter could really do.  If 600 hundred people want to hear about Mother Mary sightings then how many would want to hear about the ins and outs of a professional dance company, dancer, dance school, etc?

I admit that I only just opened my Twitter account two weeks ago, so I am a newbie to this phenomenon.  Since my job as a dancer never needs a computer or a phone, there were few reasons for me to connect to the virtual world.  However, I do check my Facebook page daily and most dancers check much more.  I have hundreds of friends on Facebook. What if all these friends of mine would start following my dance company on Twitter?  What if all the company members’ fans and friends started following Hubbard Street?  There would be thousands of people in constant communication with the company.

Helping to build a huge community of fans is just one of the things that Twitter can do. It can tell the story from a personal point of view. It can be a place where the voices of dancers can intertwine with each other.  It can be one part in rethinking how we can, as a community, start to revolutionize the art form.

In Iran during the uprising of the Presidential elections Iranian’s used Twitter to speak out, to choose places to gather and connect, and to build of voice of opposition.

With such a powerful tool, everyone could know when a great performance is about to happen.  Or if you decided to put on an impromptu improv show next to a fountain in the park with dancers from this and that company, you could at least get a small crowd. But that small crowd would help to build a new audience.

In a dance world where many companies are losing their fan base, where the voice of dance seems to be fading, this is a way to pull our community together to connect to a younger, or at least newer, audience. Come on, it’s time to Tweet to a newer tune.

When I think of the $80 ticket price (the cheapest seats) for the Ana Laguna and Baryshinkov performances at the Harris Theater in Chicago this weekend, I cringe. When I can only spend $80 a week on groceries how can I justify spending $80 dollars for a single show. It is ridiculous, and it is precisely why I and many other dancers and non-dancers who would die to see this show will miss out.

Compare this to the ten nights of dance performances at City Center, in NYC this week, during it’s annual Fall for Dance Series. All tickets are $10 and, even with the sometimes questionable programming, the dancers will inspire.  Every seat will be filled, an experience rarely found at any dance performance today. In most cases young adults choose to see a movie or go to a museum for an artistic outing, for the $10-$20 sticker price. But, the Fall for Dance series is a instance where those young adults who can’t afford the $80-$150 tickets can afford to see one or ten live performances of dance. These types of performances not only bring young crowds together and inspire but they also help rebuild a community of dance that has dissipated in the last years because it is so disconnected to it’s contemporary audience.

If New York can do this with its dance community, why can’t every major city in the United States?

Chicago has started to offer more free dance concerts, mainly in the summer, with the Chicago Dancing Festival and outdoor performances by companies such as the Joffery ballet.  Where is Chicago’s Fall for Dance or San Francisco’s, LA’s, Seattle’s, Houston’s, Miami’s and Washington DC’s?  All these cities have enough large corporations to underwrite such performances. So why do they not exist yet?

I hope that soon the dance communities and supporters in each of these cities, and many other cities not mentioned, will wake up and realize dance needs to rebuild its network and that programs like Fall for Dance are a great way to do this. Even if only those who can’t afford the $80 and up ticket price could find comfort in the fact that once, twice, or ten times a year there are live dance performances for the price of a movie.

Twyla Tharp has devised a new  musical ” Come Fly with Me” set to the music of Frank Sinatra previewing at the AllianceTheater in Atlanta, Ga.

She has an all star dance cast from Ashley Tuttle (ABT), Holley Farmer( Merce Cunningham) and John Selya(Eddie in Movin’ Out). I hope she finds her footing on this one after the entertaining but mediocre “Movin’ Out”, set to Billy Joel music, and the embarrassing flop of the awful “The Times They Are a-Changin”, set to Bob Dylan Songs.

Maybe she’ll regain the flair and spirit of genius that we’ve seen in works such as “Duece Coup” and “In the Upper Room” in “Come Fly with Me”, but somehow I get an awful feeling that makes my toes cramp that this is no better than Poor Bob.

I pray that Twyla hasn’t turned into the dance version of Elton John with another cheesy poof musical, but maybe it’s already too late.

Read more about “Come Fly with Me.” in Gia Kourlas nytimes article A Night Club. Sinatra Singing. Couples in Love.

A reader in the Chicago Tribune writes to complain about the rude audience at the Joffery Ballet’s Thursday night performance in Millennium Park.

“A picnic eaten indoors isn’t dinner at Alinea, and a ballet performance held outdoors isn’t a Cubs game. I was distressed by the rude behavior at last night’s Joffrey Ballet performance in Millennium Park.”

Why can’t ballet be more like a Cubs game?  When we go to see dance shows in a theater the audience is expected to act like vegetables, clap politely, and sip on a cocktail.  But does it always have to be this way?  The stadiums in Chicago fill up even when the teams are down and out, because whether they win or lose you get to share in an awesome communal experience.

So, the next time you go to see a dance performance just relax and show your enthusiasm.  Take your favorite beer and dress yourself like a real dance fan with your dance company logo gear (hat, t-shirt, sweat pants), some face paint and maybe even a fog horn.  Yell out for your favorite dancers at the end of pieces, and release the real dance fan within!