Why is "Bad Art" so dangerous?

Last night I went to Move the Frame's "Kinetic Cinema" at Chez Bushwick- a showing on the first Monday night of each month (curated by someone interesting in the dance, film, or dance film world) of a handful of films that fall under the broad scope of the "kinetic cinema" label.

The program itself was interesting - some good some bad as always - and hopefully i'll find the time to post about it tonight as well. But what was even more interesting to me was the discussion that followed, especially as it pertained to a specific piece - Ann Liv Young's "Snow White Paris" (2006). (Video of another work here.)

The film, less dancefilm and more archival shot/artifact, was excerpts from a performance of the piece. The story behind it being (we found out in our discussion) that Young had been chosen to show a work at a dancefilm exhibition, and gave the single-stationary-tripod-shot-at-a-distance film of the performance to the curator, and asked him to edit it down to the desired time. While I'm usually against this type of shooting of dance (because it neither conveys the performance nor invents something that's interestingly/impressively "new", and because for the most part it happens out of more of an oversight, budget constraint, or lack of options than aesthetic/artistic decision) I enjoyed watching the artifact for a number of reasons. First, the movement (in my opinion), while neither hugely innovative (it was in the genre of pop cultureisms reclaimed as movement, being performed to snippets of hip hop/pop songs) or shot in anything nearing good quality, the dancing itself was viscerally strong and thus interesting to watch, and the set was aesthetically innovative enough to grab my intention for the entirety of the piece - about 10 minutes. While I certainly wouldn't have called it a "dancefilm" per se, I did enjoy it more than some of the installation-like pieces that were created to loop in galleries that seemed to go on and on (as loops in galleries do...) -which exist in my mind not quite "dancefilms" either.

In the discussion following the screening (there were maybe about fifteen of us there) two women in particular raised the point that they were offended somehow by the inclusion of Young's piece under the title of dancefilm, as it (they argued) clearly was not. One woman (I don't know her name) described her feelings towards pieces such as these saying something along the lines of, "I always cringe when I see a piece like this in a dancefilm festival, because I think about the one person sitting and watching it who's never seen dancefilm before who's just so turned off by it...we have to really uplift the genre of dancefilm and start defining what's 'good' and what's 'bad'." The other woman in agreement echoed her opinion, suggesting that this was an example of bad dancefilm (which made her have a "viscerally enraged" - her words - reaction). When Tony suggested that maybe it wasn't productive to exclude anything from the umbrella of dancefilm yet, he seemed to be quickly dismissed. Other suggestions for "uplifting" the genre of dancefilm included taking more cues from a study of film, as it has been being taught for years and years, which seemed to me a suggestion to take "what the film world has already decided is good and bad" into our aesthetic code, simply because it carries a history and legacy.

As I thought about it more that night, I was struck by the memory of why dancefilm first seemed attractive to me - Ezra Caldwell, Kathy Westwater, and Sara Smith speaking at a Sarah Lawrence dance meeting about how their film work had reached thousands more people than their stage work, and cut budgets nearly in half. Though dance tech certainly isn't the same thing as dancefilm, I also recollected many of Tony's teachings through the last two years - the use of dance tech and media as a gurellia tool to circumvent what was deemed impossible by the traditional dance world, artistically, viscerally, economically, and in time and space.

To me, dancefilm has always been a freeing platform partly because it doesn't have to be "good" - film is a relatively new technology for the dance world, so it's somewhat understood that choreographers are still developing and refining their skills as they produce each new instalment. It's not that dancefilm should be unkempt, or should have a pass from being judged on the same levels as both film and live performance just because it's young and choreographers are still figuring out how to work a camera and FCP in a sophisticated manner - as i've said a million times: bad work is bad work. But it does seem that there's a little more leeway given in film - a prime example was Jillian Pena's piece "COMPROMISE" (2005) where the illusions she created were sometimes eclipsed by the lack of technical sophistication, but she more than made up for it with the charm of her work.

It also seems to me that part of the excitement of dancefilm/tech/media is that there are so many different aspects of it, and everyone is still making sense of what is what, what it can be used for, and why it's effective, or not. There's straight up dance film - dances made for the camera and nowhere else - but then theres web dance, performance connected through webcast, projection/film/dancefilm within performance, dancefilms based on a work that was originally performance, dance performances based of what were originally dance films, and everything in between. And yes, artifacts of performance in the form of video. Doesn't that fit the bill too?

I don't know Young or the cannon of her work well enough to argue whether she was being clever and provocative by insisting that, yes, this was a type of dancefilm, or just uninterested in the conversion of her work to a film medium but wanting to be shown in the original festival, but the fact that she sells DVDs of all her performances on her website points to the former.

Regardless, I am still impressed by this trend i'm noticing, mostly in older (30's/40's) group of dancers to really be quite damning of "bad work". Why? It's one thing to not like a work, consider it bad, or really think that it's poorly made. It's another thing altogether to advocate that "bad work" (of any medium) shouldn't have a place or voice. Again, why?

Is it a fear that the bad work will spread and contaminate our own? Is it distain for those who have not learned what we have already discovered about the mechanics and aesthetics of "good work" (if it can even be defined...it can't)? Is it an embarrassment because it reflects our own past? Really - someone tell me - why is bad work so threatening? If it's bad, so what. No one died because you didn't enjoy it. No one couldn't afford to feed their family because it got negative responses on youtube and got rejected from a film festival. And, surprising though it may be, your own work probably didn't suffer from seeing it - if anything, maybe the experience of seeing a "bad work" clarified your understanding of what does work and is successful in dance.

So what is it?
Could it be that we - as the woman who first spoke out against Young's piece felt - really feel that the dance and dancefilm worlds are so close to making it out there in the big wide world, so close to being accepted by the mainstream population, and we worry that if someone sees a bad piece, it will just be another tip of the scale out of our favor? Are we really still under the impression that if we continue to just make ourselves better that someone will finally like us?

Wake up, people.
Continuing to make "good dance" will do little to nothing for the dance economy, and even if it would, it wouldn't be achieved conversely by outlawing "bad dance."

Anything that claims to be dance has a place in our community, and likewise for dancefilm.

From the Land of Digital Natives.

Back (well almost) from the long week of apartment hunting and interviews,
i return with a new wealth of information!

I was lucky enough to get to have lunch with a very special lady, Emily Sharp, who does all of the AOMC's website design and is a general digital goddess, and she gave me a new term/idea to play around with: digital natives and digital immigrants.

Now, i'm new to this idea, so if you want more information check this out instead, but here's a recap: a digital native is anyone who grew up with the massive storm of tech advances (mainly personal ones like computers, mp3 players, i-everythings) that we have today, and a digital immigrant is someone who (regardless of their tech capabilities) did not grow up with these technologies being an everyday part of their lives. So. The cool thing about this is that people are starting to really challenge academic and other learning systems with this divide - are the old systems of learning appropriate for this generation? How can new tech systems (or spin-offs of the technologies that "those damn kids" already use become academic tools? Or, as Emily put it, "Should a school try to be facebook?".

This, as you might imagine, is drawing a bit of controversy. For many technophobic individuals and institutions, reactions to this new questioning borders on what Bennett, Maton & Kervin (2008) in their research identify as moral panic.

So hold on that thought.

The other thing that i've been doing this summer is (ravenously) reading any and everything by Chuck Palahniuk. So far: Rant, Fight Club, and Survivor, which leaves me reading his short story collection "Stranger than Fiction" right now. In his essay "You Are Here" (which i highly recommend) he paints the scene of a hotel-based convention where people fork over money to have their seven minutes to sit in front of a producer or tv exec and pitch their scripts and screenplays. He talks about the new influx of people who are suddenly writing their own screenplays - a new and very big trend - citing five reasons for this "explosion in storytelling".
1. (he argues) free time
2. (he says) technology
3. (he points to) material
4. (he notices) education and
god bless him, 5. disgust.
His overall point being, for the first time, people aren't having experiences that they make into stories to sell, but rather the other way around. He writes:

"Okay, okay, so maybe we're headed down a road toward mindless, self-obsessed lives where every event is reduced to words and camera angles. Every moment imagined through the lens of a cinematographer. Ever funny or sad remark scribbled down for sale at the first opportunity.
A world Socrates couldn't imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of movie and paperback potential.
Where a story no longer follows as the result of an experience.
Now the experience happens in order to generate a story.
Sort of like when you suggest: 'Let's not but say we did'
The story - the product you can sell - becomes more important than the actual event."

So of course this is a little alarming. And I imagine that some of you, who have been arguing that this is the very problem with hypermedia all along (especially Ilona) are slapping your palms to your forehead and grimacing, as if to say "how can you have heard us say this so many times, and only now be getting it through this thick skull of yours..."
HOWEVER.
(because there's always a however)

I find these two ideas very much in conversation, and the two of them, of course, chatting with the idea of hypermedia.
For better or for worse, this is the culture that we live in. And regardless of your personal comfort with technology, just as your parents are digital immigrants no matter how good they are at texting you (and no matter how proud they are of it), you (for the most part - i'm not sure who actually reads this) are a digital native.
So yes, spend a minute or three complaining about the situation (with or sans moral panic, your choice) but then realize that it's the society that we live in right now.

My point is this:
YES. hypermedia (and screen writing, and video game design, and novel writing for that matter) all hold the danger that the presented "experience" is valued over or the reality that it was based on, so much so that the reality begins to be less important, less real. But it strikes me as interesting that we now have the opportunity to look at how our work is working within this system and mindset rather than just bitching about how much we dislike it and wish it was the way it used to be. This is the future! Why not play around a little before we condemn?

My point is: hypermedia is just a system that a digital native came up with to deal with the world that they knew as normal.

My point is: hypermedia is in the same vein as a school board considering how to digitize the curriculum because the students no longer have any interest in paying attention to writing on the board.

My point is: it's still so early in this discussion that we shouldn't be throwing anything out, just because of the possible danger that it holds.

My point is: when a caveman wrote the first book, the other cavemen may have thought 'why do we need these words to tell us about hunting a boar? Why don't we just do it ourselves?"

Chuck's point is:

"One positive aspect is, maybe this awareness and recording will lead us to live more interesting lives. Maybe we'll be less likely to make the same mistakes again and again...Controlling the story of your past - recording and exhausting it - that skill might allow us to move into the future and write that story. Instead of letting life just happen, we could outline our own personal plot. We'll learn the craft we need to accept that responsibility. We'll develop our ability to imagine in finer and finer detail. We can more exactly focus on what we want to accomplish, to attain, to become."