Does anyone really like to watch dance films?

Are dance films too purist in their approach to cinema to be engaging for a broad audience? Can Dance Film enter the global film market in a way that is genuinely engaging, complex and truthful?

…Dance films aren’t always the easiest to stay engaged with. The absence of text and the abstract language of movement can create a barrier between our full immersion into the character and story of the film. It is often our investment and care for the characters which draws us along the conveyor belt of the film's trajectory be it narrative or abstract. With dance films however, the absence of text can shorten our viewers attention to the work, as more often then not, they aren't being 'fed' with complexity and nuance in the same way they would be with narrative cinema. But can we do something as dance film directors to support the digestibility of our work and lengthen audience engagement?

If we think of the musical - they were, and are able to enter into the world of globally viewed entertainment in the film sector. The scores and lyrics are communicative and help assist the film’s narrative and character trajectory. They are also not purist in their form of expression. The singers are not only singing, they are first and foremost real characters that have a goal, a background, a desire, nuance and specificity. The musical still follows the rules of cinema which help the audience stay connected and invested. The song does not just serve itself thus becoming an incongruent, inefficient, convoluted black hole within the film's momentum. The song is an (albeit artistically heightened) vehicle for story telling, in the same way that text is. On the assumption we communicate through speech and text,  the song can be a heightened, poetic articulation of this very thing, as long as it does not lose sight of its purpose. 

If song can work in this way - can dance? Historically dance HAS been in films, but usually as the accompaniment to the song. The song still holds the storytelling, and the dance is the younger sibling coming along for the ride.  While the voice says “life is fun” the dance says “pax deus boree, great, turn, fun, jump”. The little brother is trying to say things in a relevant manner but it gets lost in itself on the way. Press mute on a musical and you can see how dance has historically been too abstract, showy, virtuosic to hold the film’s truth, character narratives and momentum (unless we are talking about emotional extremes e.g love, violence and lust). But I would like to find a way to make progress, to let the little brother grow and do things on his own. To do this we need to make dance and the moving body more specific, relevant and truthful, and it would help if we employed some tools from the rules of cinema. I want at this point  to stipulate that  I am not saying that dance films have to be narrative, they can be abstract art pieces, but we still need to care about what is going on - even more so if our goal  is for us to connect to the dancers as humans rather than moving forms. 

So, can we draw a parallel with body language as a communicator of human relationship, tension and communication as we have done with song. Where song is the heightened, poetic, artistic exaggeration of speech, can dance do the same for body language and movement? I think simply put the answer is yes, but some of the main criteria to do this is that we must stay relevant and we must keep saying something new. We can’t cloud our purpose - whether this fog is caused by our egos, the dance form’s technical virtuosity or self indulgence into dance for dance sake -   we shouldn’t stall along the film’s the journey to keep making the same statement over and over again nor should we say something random choreographically because the movement looks cool. If the road is the story, we should keep walking forward, we shouldn't stop to walk back and forth across the width of the road before continuing forward again. The journey will lose purpose and direction, and it will be frustrating to trudge banally the width of the road for no relevant reason. 

Within the quest to make dance films more engaging and nuanced for a universal audience, we can improve our approach to choreography (as highlighted above) but we can also borrow tools from the language of traditional filmmaking - be it voice overs, folly/sound effects, close ups, subtitles, cinematic storytelling, plot lines, character development etc etc. If we keep the character’s perspective mute, if they don’t have a purpose, if the camera stays at a formal distance to only show the body as a form, we distance ourselves from the humanity of those on our screen, and consequently the relationship our audience can create to the film won't be a personal one..

I think there is so much potential within the dance film genre to be a rich vehicle for storytelling that is raw and emotional, but we could look at the landscape of the film genre that we (as dance film directors) are trying to penetrate. We could learn from film so we can join the conversation. Whilst there are many great dance films, there are far too many that are beautiful but  communicate almost nothing beyond that.  I do not claim to know the answers, nor to assert that my existing body of work has even made strides in this endeavour. But I would like to.