|
More Buzz
Go Home
The Buzz, 6-22: Fortress
Dance
Will France's New Centre National de la Danse Promote the Art or
Perpetuate "Apartheid"?
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2004 The Dance Insider
PANTIN, France -- It
has 11 studios, including three that can be used for performance;
a 'mediatheque' comprising 20,000 books, photographs, and videos;
a space for encounters among professionals; rooms for screenings,
expositions, and conferences; and a restaurant. From an American
perspective, and notwithstanding its drab gray facade, the achievement
of the Centre National de la Danse, which opened this past weekend
on an entire block on the banks of the Ourcq Canal just outside
of Paris, is staggering. In the fiscal year 2004, federal spending
on dance in the US will come to about $7 million. In France, the
federal investment into turning this Paris suburb's former administration
building into a national dance center alone came to 15.6 million
Euros, or about $20 million US. The 2004 budget for this research,
pedagogic, training, resource, and performance center comes to about
$10.5 million US, $8.4 million of which will come from federal funds.
In other words, while the US will spend less than 2 1/2 cents in
federal funds per capita on dance funding this year, France spent
33 cents per person on renovating the new centre, and will spend
14 cents per person this year on funding its activities. So what,
you might ask, is the problem?
It's not for no reason
that the minister of culture and communications showed up to dedicate
the CND facility with an escort of three police busses and two police
vans, nor that a dissident group of dance educators and artists
posted flyers on neighborhood bus shelters and lamp-posts accusing
the new centre, the Maison de la Danse and the Centres Choregraphiques
Nationaux of becoming "places of apartheid that benefit a minority,"
demanding that they become, instead, "places of encounter, of sharing,
and of relations between all." (A spokesman said the CND would have
no comment on the apartheid charge.)
Let's return for a moment
to that funding comparison. Because of the scarcity of public funds,
dance and other artists in the US have had to make recourse to private
funds, from foundations and individuals. Because of US tax laws,
which allow these philanthropists to write off their donations --
i.e., deduct them from their taxable income -- there's an incentive
for private largesse. Although there are some foundations here,
they don't have the same tax incentive and the beneficiaries of
their generosity are by and large major companies and theaters.
I couldn't just write a check to my friend Amelie's dance company
and claim it as a deduction on my taxes. Because there is no system
in place for finding private support, Amelie, in turn, needs public
funding. Because this is difficult to get -- only 64 companies in
the Paris region received national funding this year, although this
is augmented by regional resources -- and because she doesn't know
the dozen or so people who control funding, Amelie will probably
be left out in the cold. Up until this year, if she worked 507 hours
in one year, no matter for how many companies, as long as they were
legit, Amelie could get unemployment compensation for up to one
year. If all ther dancers in her company got it too, she could basically
rehearse while supported by unemployment. On January 1, however,
the regime, as it's called, for France's Intermittent (or freelance)
performing artists and technicians was tightened up: Amelie now
has eight months in which to log 507 hours to be eligible for what
is now just 10.5 months of unemployment. Unfortunately, Amelie didn't
quite make the quota, and is now one of about 20,000 Intermittents
cut out of the system. And -- not having the resources of her entrepreneurial
American counterpart -- she's pissed. (Ergo, the police busses and
vans, and the attempt by the CND to head off any demonstrations
by granting the Intermittents their own conference room for the
week-end's glitzy ceremonies.)
My concern for Amelie
is not just because she's my friend, nor because as an arts journalist
whose income is tied to the anemic arts funding structure in the
US, I can't afford to pick up the check for appertifs all the time.
My concern -- like that of M. Bruni -- is for the art as well. M.
Bruni is a spokesperson for the Permanent Counsel of Schools and
Companies for the Teaching of and Research into Dance. They're the
ones who've charged the CND and the rest of official Dancedom here
with setting up an apartheid-like system which benefits only the
select few. Their concern is not just that they are not getting
theirs. Rather, M. Bruni looks at the deleterious effect the official
arts dictatorship is having on dance here, and finds it hard to
smile. He sees publicly funded festivals, like the Rencontres Choregraphique
"Internationales" de Seine-Saint Denis, whose directors work "in
a manner incongruous with opening up the culture of dance and encountering
this art," and which bring back the same ten companies every year,
or seem to. (For my critique of the Rencontres Choregraphiques,
please click here.) He sees some of the spectacles that the
CND has aided -- such as the recent commercial show "Scan, More
Business, More Money Management" (I didn't have to translate that,
the original title was in English) which "demystify the values of
the body in movement."
I see spectacles (in
the English sense of the word) like culture and communications minister
Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres telling the toney inauguration audience
at the CND that "The quarrel of Ancients and Moderns is today behind
us," and wonder what planet Monsieur Donnedieu de Vabres is on.
Certainly not the one in which the dancers at and the audience of
the Paris Opera Ballet are in an uproar because the next season
will include just three, count 'em three, classical ballets. (And
for you moderns out there about to clap your hands at the idea of
more modern work at the Paris Opera House, trust me, with the exception
of Pina Bausch and Trisha Brown, this is not the work that represents
you in your best suit.)The new minister (the last one was hounded
out by the Intermittents; how's that for dancer power, Bob Yesselman?
) could mean, of course, that the battle is behind us because the
moderns have won, but really, there is little dance in the ancient
or TRUE modern mode to be seen on local dance stages these days,
including at the opening of the Centre National de la "Danse." Shortly
after the doors of the CND opened Friday evening, the festivities
were interrupted by the sound of blaring sirens. It wasn't the black-uniformed
gendarmes lurking by the police vans and busses parked by the canal
behind the building responding to an unexpected Intermittents action,
but heralded the arrival of Robyn Orlin. The members of the South
African company were, unfortunately, not there to alert the invited
audience to a new apartheid, at least not intentionally. Bearing
bullhorns and blathering in English, they made a spectacle of themselves,
a spectacle which, notwithstanding the "Ruth St. Denis" and "Vaslav
Nijinsky" tee-shirts they sported over white tights (do I even need
to add that men and women alike wore wigs?), had little to do with
dance, but everything to do with the current dance-allergic state
of much of anointed dance in France, and did not portend well for
the Centre National de la "Danse."
Later in the evening,
Isabella Roncaglio performed a piece d'occasion by Francesca Lattuada,
"Mouvements," narrated by the throaty French Tom Waits-sound-alike
Arthur H, in which the 'flower' of dance buds, extends her limbs,
and dies. Piece d'occasion, indeed.
Time to sound the alarm.
More Buzz
Go Home
|
