What is Dance? Sport? Art?
I've gotten kind of caught up in the spectacle and controversy around Olympic breaking. I haven't actually watched it but I'm fascinated with the public's reaction. They took a African American folk dance and turned it into an international sporting competition and discovered not everyone across our planet has a shared idea of what the dance is. Whats hilarious to me is my non dance friends are encountering this for the first time. As a dancer in many folk signs there's something very familiar about the whole thing. I guess I'm generally of the opinion competition is bad for vernacular dance. I'll take it as given that dancers are athletes. Certainly top dancers physical prowess is deserving of Olympic level attention. But when dance is treated as a sport it necessary means introducing scoring and rules. For vernacular dances these were never part of the tradition. From what I've seen scoring naturally restricts creativity. With dancers avoidin...