Understanding Dance etc, etc?


I had been discussing my course tonight with my husband. I commented that my MAPP colleagues and I all came from different backgrounds of the Performing Arts and didn't always agree on aspects of whether a dance work had merits or not. He, not coming from a dance background, said, that he hadn't enjoyed the album Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield to start with but on listening to it several times he had discovered the different layers within it.
It made me think of the different layers that exist when we look at choreographers, their dance pieces, genres and how we build on them.
When I first went to collage and started teaching I thought, I hated contemporary dance. Why is someone dancing in a tea bag I thought? Why on earth would you just walk about the stage and occasionally do a 'gymnastic' movement with your fellow dancer? How can it be 'dance' when all you are doing is gesturing, not pointing your toes and pushing, shoving and rolling on the floor with your fellow dancers? 
I started teaching GCSE and A Level Dance around 2006. This opened my eyes to professional dance works that were not in my radar. My first knowledge of Marie Rambert was when my Mother told me that her cousin had been in the Ballet Rambert. This was in the early days when Marie Ramberts company concentrated on classical dance. When I started to research the company from 1966 when Marie chose Norman Morrice as Associate Director, I was amazed at the wealth of pieces. Glen Tetley's Pierrot Lunaire 1967 and Christopher Bruce's Ghost Dances 1981. This led to the most recent specification of professional works for GCSE Dance. Artificial Things by Stopgap Dance, Emancipation of Expression by Boy Blue and Within Her Eyes by James Cousins. To be honest they blew my mind! 
The more I watched the pieces and delved into the why, what and where, the more I understood and discovered that dance has so many layers. 
Just like Tubular Bells went against the convention of the day, but when you listened to the whole album the instruments built up and made sense, dance and its many genres continues to build. From humble beginnings it builds to a crescendo. Like life. You start from no where but who knows where your path will lead you?

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