Talk:Concert dance

Main article

Shouldn't performance dance be the main article? In my opinion, concert dance sounds like dance styles that are only fit for large performances, often commercial in nature, while performance dance to me also includes smaller exhibitions and performances. The latter has more hits on Google as well. Wintran 12:34, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I only chose to do it this way around because that was what the merge tag suggested. Kcordina ^Talk 13:34, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I see. I'll see if I can find a discussion of this somewhere, or else I might move this to performance dance if no-one objects. It's good that you performed the merging in any case. Wintran 13:56, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Merge from Dance Theatre

A new editor has created a new article on titled Dance Theatre, the article is actually about performance or concert dance rather than the contemporary dance related "dance theatre", after material is merged the other article should redirect, either to a new dance theatre article or as currently to "contemporary dance". Paul foord 11:59, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

(copied from User talk:Paul foord Concert dance rather than "Dance Theatre": The attempt was to channelize dance broadly into dance theatre & dancesport. Since ballroom, latin american, club dance (salsa, jive, etc.). are social recreational dances and also competitive, professional dances performed at different championships as dancesport items and ballet (classical, jazz, modern, contemporary), traditional indian (temple ie. kathak, bharatanatyam, odissi, manipuri, kuchipdi & kathakali) dances, persian classical dances are primarily for an audience in the theatre (both amateur & professional), I think that it is the first broad division subject to many other divisions. The Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, London shares this view. [1] Though it is not the authority on the subject it does make the study of the subject a little more concise & simple.

I am of the view that the term Dance Theatre is akin to Concert Dance except for the fact that Ballroom Dance (listed as a Concert Dance) is a social/participative dance and is a recognised competitive dancesport than a performance/concert dance.

Exq bea 02:00, 22 June 2007

Also note that there is another article with a very similar title: Dance theater. There is also a redirect page called Dance theatre that redirects to Contemporary dance, and Tanztheater that redirects to Dance theater. I started looking at these because SuggestBot suggested I might like to merge Dance Theatre and Concert dance -- I might, but I don't think that's the worst of the issues here! Auntof6 (talk) 07:18, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Looking at the clearest link at Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing http://www.istd.org/dancestyles/moderntheatre/jazz/intro.html the point is not clear. Dance theatre is commonly used by many contemporary dance companies in their name. This would seem to give precedence to contemporary dance in use of the term. Paul foord 08:55, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

See also from Contemporary dance

sketch showing lineage of 20th century concert dance © Ohka-
Note: this sketch is provided for illustrative purposes only

dance theatre

Here in NY (which is not the entire world of dance, but not so small either) this term is used exclusively as the redoubtable Paul foord writes, not least by Dance Theater Workshop. — Robert Greer (talk) 02:11, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Remodeling

It's so much fun! This cramped old place will be much nicer with some extra space and nice furnishings. User:Snow Rise, what did you have in mind? FourViolas (talk) 23:10, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, my thinking is that we start at the middle and work our way "outward", as it were. As it would happen, I was just discussing this on Lambtron's talk. I think we need a hub article which draws the appropriate parallels and connections between various forms of classical dance, through which we can try to put the major genres (western ballet, modern, lyrical, contemporary and so-forth) and all of their over-lapping nomenclature into perspective. That could be done here by fleshing out existing material, or it could be done by creating an article titled Western classical dance. Currently [[classical dance]] redirects to ballet, which is probably appropriate, given the present options, but in modern parlance, "classical" is increasingly being used to refer not just to ballet and its techniques, but also all other forms of concert dance which have descended from it and retain a strong focus on formal training and technique. I'm not certain which option to pursue (I want to look at more sources and see how often they use "classical" to mean strictly ballet, as opposed to the expanded use -- though clearly dancers in the anglophone world use the expanded sense quite regularly, probably owing to the fact that cross-genre training is more common).

Whichever we opt for, this article should end up more robust as well. I think it's appropriate that this article remain the "global" article for discussing all dance that takes the form of theatre-based performance. There's plenty of room here to expand the "Concert dance forms" section to a proper prose section. The level of detail already provided for each style seems about right, but we should add mention to any number of other concert dance types, including some we don't have articles for, but which I intend to author myself in the near future, including Chinese classical dance, and Musical theatre dance (with Broadway dance redirecting there), as well as Jazz dance (which is another article we at least have, but which could use some serious augmentation. Note that, at least when compared with Asian equivalents (which are often drastically different forms of dance), western classical dance has been more of one solid tradition, so I think it makes sense to discuss it together in one article; who knows, some day we might eventually have enough material that other articles can be split off from it (Classical dance in Germany, Classical dance in the United States, ect.) but we're a long way off from that.

Ok, so I appreciate my above comments are all over the place, so here's the bulletin points:

• For this article, we expand the "Concert dance forms" section to full prose. We discuss (in brief WP:SUMMARYSTYLE) the development and inter-relatedness for western classical styles, Chinese classical styles, Indian classical styles, Persian classical styles, Broadway/Muscial theater styles and Jazz. But we do our best to keep the associations and history of development sourced and we try to keep the discussion focused on these genres as they relate to theater performance.
• We create Western classical dance, Chinese classical dance, Musical theatre dance and augment Modern dance, Contemporary dance and Jazz dance.
• Western classical dance becomes the place for trying to keep straight all of the sub-disciplines of classical dance and the "technical" styles that have descended from ballet and western concert dance in general.
• In adding all of this new content, we do our best to try not trip over ourselves while explaining to the reader why the lingo is not always consistent from context to context.
• We avoid using any one single source to define the boundaries of a particular sub-discipline. I've noticed this is consistently a problem in our sourcing for dance articles. Sometimes we have sources that were clearly added to build up the reputation of a given teacher or school, and WP:UNDUE weight is accordingly put on their opinion of what the definition of a certain genre is, where it developed as a distinct art, and who is responsible for it. That it is, there seems to be an effort to assign credit at times in a way that not all sources necessarily support. If possible, we should focus on texts that explore the history of dance broadly, though dance mag interviews and such would probably be acceptable in most cases. The internet materials that I've seen supporting some articles in the past are not really acceptable as reliable sources and are often problematic in other regards (largely for the quasi-promotional aspect noted above).
• Continuing from the above point, I'd like to see a bit less name dropping; excepting when that person has their own Wikipedia article (or could at some point) this kind of non-contextual reference is not very useful to our readers in understanding what typifies a particular style of dance. Instead, I would rather we tried to describe the differences based on the the type of movement and technique that each style tends to exhibit and focus upon. Obviously, this presents certain challenges to us that are almost unique to Wikipedia articles, because describing these characteristics in prose is often just not a very useful strategy. This is why I'm very grateful that we have Lambtron, since some of their media can be used to illustrate some of these points (and who knows, with his/her association with professional dancers, perhaps we might be able to request further demonstrations of particular styles of movement / specific techniques. If they are capable of providing more animated pictures, or (better yet, video files, be they even short and/or with lower resolution) then we can make some of these articles truly amazing-looking and informative. I'm not rightly certain what the image-use policy says about animated pictures, but I suspect that they are restricted or discouraged in article space for performance/loading reasons unless they are very brief or are simple diagrams that load quickly. No matter though; if necessary, we can convert animated photos to proper video formats and insert those, with just a little loss in quality. It's not so much relevant to this page, but for those in which we go into more detail about technique and what sets styles apart, the old adage of "a picture is worth a thousand words" has never been truer.

Ok...well, went on rather at length about general issues for the project rather than focusing on this article as I arguably should have in this space (and I may move this to the WikiProject soon as a result), but those are my initial thoughts. What do you think? Snow talk 01:18, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Great! I'm very excited—this was what I hoped WP would be like when I signed up last fall, and now I think I'm fluent enough in WP to be able to help.

• I think this page should be the "hub article." "Classical dance" in Western usage meant "ballet" exclusively until a few decades ago, and it usually excludes many genres: all modern since Martha Graham or maybe Lester Horton, as well as all jazz, African, and postmodern. These areas have plenty of artistic vitality, and with the cross-pollination you mention I think it would be hard to get into, say, contemporary ballet without bringing in Graham's ideas. I'd rather have the hub be about Dance as Art, the "theatre-based performance" you mentioned, which will still allow its spoke articles to stay in the scholarly tradition rather than the amateurish tone unfortunately common in WP's dance articles today.
• I agree that the core group (top-importance) should include Western classical dance, Chinese classical dance, Musical theatre dance, Modern dance, Contemporary dance and Jazz dance, and suggest adding Postmodern dance and Indian classical dance. The characteristics, relationships and history of these should be the topic of this page.
• Concert dance is contrasted with Folk dance and Popular dance (which should be a bluelink pointing to folk and whatever research can be scrounged on club dance, etc.). This division should be noted. I think the WP:CABAL we're forming is focusing on art dance, although I'd like to put in some effort on the others sooner or later.
• We will have permanent problems with non-promo WP:RS, because dance is under-appreciated by academia. I know I sound like every WP:NOBLE WP:ACTIVIST ever, but our job should be to milk the best resources we can find to make the art form sound interesting and valuable. It simply hasn't been fashionable over the past few centuries to pay dance the same respect accorded classical music or painting. This is especially true for female- and minority-dominated forms like early modern (Isadora Duncan never got her due because she projected femininity and frivolity) and vernacular tap dance ("entertainment, not art"). This is changing with the efforts of scholars like Sally Banes and Rusty Frank, but we will have some work to do tracking down resources. I may not have much access to academic libraries until this fall, so I have to pass on being the refs person for now.
• We should have a WP:Series sidebar for easy navigation, especially if we're building a series of interrelated articles.
• I agree that Lambtron is a fantastic resource. Visual art forms deserve excellent illustrations. I know from personal experience as a reader that WP video files tend to be buggy, so it would be nice to keep lots of photos around.

This is going to be fun! FourViolas (talk) 21:28, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Sounds like we're very much on the same page! I literally don't part from your perspective on any one thing above except the very minor matter that popular dance might be better redirected to Social dance for the time being, seeing as "folk dance" often reflects specific traditional dance of particular cultures, whereas "social dance" embraces modern styles as well. Though Social dance needs some serious fleshing out at present. The series sidebar is a great idea -- indeed, it's one of those notions that strikes you as obvious once someone else points it out to you. :) As to sources, my week is full-up with goings-on, but once the weekend rolls around, I intend to set aside some hours to scour around both online and at university and municipal libraries to get us started in that regard. Wish me luck! Snow talk 08:15, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Redirect  Done and agreed that social dance needs an overhaul as well (eventually). Best of luck! I'll gather up some sources too. Maybe we should develop the series bar soon to remind ourselves (and collaborators who join us) what we'd like to work on? FourViolas (talk) 11:23, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

@FourViolas:. So I only just got around to the task of searching out sources today. I got a decent haul of materials -- a dozen plus sources, from which I recovered about a 60-70 pages that may provide salient detail for this article. I put emphasis on "may" because a lot of these materials are, unfortunately, more about the type of odious and subjective deconstruction of the art that you find whenever social science attempts to examine an art form -- full of language from the unwieldy, overwrought idiolect you find in "academics" who are really saying nothing of substance and very light on actual facts or empirical insight. In other words, limited in terms of encyclopedic value and our purposes here. Nonetheless, there are some more on-point sources in the bunch and I expect there should be enough material to augment the article to several times its current length. I'll just need a week or so to parse the material and start adding the content in. Interestingly, even though I was concentrating on western classical dance, I got a lot of incidental material on Asian classical/modern traditions that is a lot more historical in nature. There was one mammoth resource Looking at Contemporary Dance that I really wanted a look at, but could not view due to aggravating technical issues with an archive that I couldn't resolve. It's unfortunate because, looking at the table of contents for the work, it's a comprehensive review of the transition from classical to modern to contemporary dance over the last two centuries, examining about a hundred different choreographers and other major artistic contributors in chronological order as each came on the scene and left their mark. Anyway, I'll take another crack at it later, and I'll be adding the other references to the article itself shortly, possible before I begin to add content and the in-lines. Snow talk 05:20, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! I tried to get ahold of Looking at Contemporary Dance, but came up short for now. I'm going to try to teach myself how to make a series sidebar in my sandbox. Let me know how you'd like to divide tasks. FourViolas (talk) 03:44, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

References