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Are You Still Immersed In The Process? How Content Culture Can Cap The Artist

 It felt so good to move, undulate, and slide into a deep second position to recoil into a contorted contraction. It truly felt like breathing. Surely, I adore codified technique. However, taking a contemporary class last night taught me way more than I bargained for. Get out of your headspace, get out of the mirror, ditch the "content concept" and just dance. I reckon that is my honest thesis. I felt like Jodie (without my Cooper) as I whisked across the floor. Throughout class I thought about the likes and wisdom of dancers like Robert Battle and Matthew Rushing. While dancing, I recalled both of their sentiments that included abandon and connection (to the floor, to the movement, to the work...) while dancing. Truly, I felt that. Suddenly, I am met with a challenge. Maybe it's culture or maybe its Maybeli — nope! It's definitely culture.  For about one minute, I wrestled with walking off of the floor, grabbing my phone, finding a proper angle to record, propping...
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Why I Don’t Listen To the New Ballet Conversation

 It is easier to deem something less than it’s actual value when it isn’t being properly valued. Maybe I’ll sound like a renegade for going against the “2022 grain” but what is up with the ballet down talk as of late? This morning I opened an article that praised the teaching of ballet technique minus its perceived toxicity. Reading things like that, I cannot help but to be reminded of the 2020 dance protests craze. Among other things, Ballet since then, has been taking shots from the ideal that it is indeed a toxic art form. Sure, after making it clear with various photo captions, you would read on to uncover incidents that have occurred in dance companies. Other times, the harsh environments and instruction of ballet would be the main idea. There needs to be a separation between harsh teachers and truly toxic environments and the TRUTH about training in classical ballet.

Like the roles of men and women on stage, costume choices and blackness, the chatter surrounding ballet’s toxicity seems to be mainly derivative of an attempt to dismantle the standard of the genre. Now more than ever artists are using their work to express the human condition. With that, In 2022, comes the faux liberation that there are no standards and doing what makes you feel happy is what’s most important. 

It is easier to call ballet toxic than to admit that it may take a bit more work than other genres. And because a great number of people would rather teach Ballet as a class where there are options to train within its structure, which helps to excel a dancer, it is much more digestible to label its entirety as toxic, under the guise of making dance more accessible or manageable.

The truth is, Ballet is not easy and the more its value to the dancer, an organization or training, is being forced to less value, the more the standards will decline. 

Who wants to purchase tickets for planned mediocrity? 

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