the urgent artist

Tendu TV seems to think so.  At least, they included the “dance is no longer ephemeral” debate  in their list of the 10 biggest issues and ideas that dance companies should and will be talking about in the coming decade.  Exciting, huh?  They write:

10.) “Dance is ephemeral”

The ephemeral nature of dance is no longer a stated truth, to be recounted over and over again as if it were the gospel. In the new decade, ephemerality is a crutch, a relic, and in most cases, simply a consequence of poor planning.

Fifty years ago, Doris Humphrey famously wrote “The one inescapable condition surrounding the choreographer in his chosen art is the hard realism of “now.” All other arts can wait for the verdict of history if they are rebuffed by the contemporary world–the choreographer not so.”

Dance has escaped the inescapable, and the ephemerality of dance has completed its journey, like so many concepts before it, down the path of obsolescence.

Personally, I’m excited by how fast the shift has been for ideas of anti-ephemeralism to catch on and start to become  mainstream.  Certainly dancefilm makers and dance technologists have been making non-ephemeral forms of dance for quite some time now, but this seems like a step further towards an actualized pathos of Anti-Ephemeralism, and I appreciate that tendu’s post is pointing to its prevalance due to bad planning or lack of awareness rather than being some innate characteristic of dance.  It’s crazy to think that just two years ago, people were telling me that I wasn’t allowed to just make up a term (“are you trying to make it sound like there’s academic backing behind it?’ “well….there is: mine.”) and that anti-ephemeralism would be the death of dance.  While i’d  stick to my guns about my anti-ephemeralism for a long time to come regardless of who was on board, it’s certianly nice to have someone else validating it as a legitimate battle cry.

I think it means good things to come for the AOMC and all of us involved in the revolution – starting with more discussion, juicy arguments, and hashing out of the whats and whys about why ephemeralism has been so important to the dance community and so accepted for so long.  I’m sure there are those of you that still feel that way, so I’m interested in hosting this debate again on UA (i don’t think we’ve revisited it since we’ve shifted to this blog, or since Tendu’s launch as the first dance-on-screen channel).

So where do you stand? Avid Anti-Ephemeralist? Here and Now Ephemeralist? Why? And where do you see this decade taking the debate?

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Tags: 2010, anti-ephemeral, dancefilm, Tendu TV, the A.O. Movement Collective