“Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost”

Pina Bausch

For over twenty years I have watched the world of dance closely from my small vantage point: the running of a dance school.
Dance concerns an enormous number of people; it is a mass phenomenon, a world conjugated in the feminine: almost all those who teach dance are women, almost all those who study dance are girls, often little girls.
The dance school is a physical place, open practically all year round, where children, young people and adolescents meet, measure themselves against one another, socialise and begin to practise their first knowledge of dance and music. It is also the place they come to by a choice of their own, probably the first of their young life.
The acquisition of the languages of dance and of music opens a door for young people to pursue specifically pedagogical aims. Non-verbal languages contribute to people's formative process by enriching their communicative capacity; at the same time, the motor skills they gain will be useful in their adult life.
Another aspect is the more broadly cultural one: contributing to the general education of tomorrow's audiences and artists, because those who have grown up practising and loving dance as an art will attend live performances as a natural completion of their cultural life and will be motivated not to settle for mediocrity.
Young people grow by relating to the family (which has a central and pre-eminent role), formal schooling, work and leisure. The dance school belongs to this last segment and sets out to help young people grow in a balanced way, leading them to accept and appreciate the beauty of their own body as it “acts”, thereby increasing their self-esteem and educating them in the emotions.
All this can also be achieved through good sporting practice, but while sport is pure physicality, dance cannot do without expressiveness and communication, that is, without culture.
Alongside the properly socio-cultural aspect that a dance school has, which has been outlined here in a schematic way, there is also the training aspect: tomorrow's dancers and choreographers will come from the dance schools, but they will be only a small part of those who take part in them. It is important, indeed necessary, for a school that wishes to call itself such, to set up vocational training paths within the structure and, at the same time, to build national and international contacts and relationships. In a career that is played out over the span of a few years, losing even a few months can do irreparable harm to a dancer's working future.
The universe of dance schools was born and developed in an absolute regulatory chaos: we find cultural and sports associations, sole proprietorships and so on; the tenacity, very feminine in this respect, with which these structures are kept standing, structures that are in fact small cultural enterprises, is surprising and astonishing.
The regulatory chaos is unjustified, both because of the importance that dance has in the growth of thousands of boys (and girls) and because of the social functions these structures fulfil. The added value in terms of civic spirit, cohesion and therefore social well-being is a richness that a community thinking of its own future ought to defend and support. This whole sector is left in the willing hands of these cultural operators, proto-entrepreneurs of themselves (in associative form, of course), who take on with enthusiasm all the risks connected with the enterprise and live on fees well below the average.
The term Culture is polysemous, and under this umbrella one can say and do practically anything. It is therefore worth trying to circumscribe it, or at least attempting to bring some clarity to those initiatives, described as cultural, that are supported with public resources and therefore by all of us.
For years we have heard it repeated that Culture is our country's oil, that every euro invested in culture generates returns of three, of seven, and some experts even say of twenty-one (euros). These sirens do not bewitch those who work culturally in a territory, because Culture is not a warehouse of works or an intelligence well stocked with information. Culture is the capacity our mind has to understand life, the events we live through, to establish relationships with other human beings. Culture is awareness of oneself and of the whole, and therefore an investment that is both emotional and economic.
The economic return that our administrators so glory in is simply the tourist return, or rather the promotion, under the pretext of culture, of our territory: a useful and proper thing, but one that has absolutely nothing to do with culture.
Indeed, if, for example, we put on a classical dance festival, the audience that will come and that, by buying a ticket, will contribute to financing the festival as well as to the local economy by making use of Hotels, Restaurants, Local Products and so on, comes to see the festival only if it already knows and loves dance, that is, only if someone else (but who?) has made them aware of it and introduced them to this world; the same holds for Music festivals or Art exhibitions.
And here we have identified another important function of the dance school: the education of the audience.
All this would be useful and extremely effective if this swarm of associations were brought into a system. In reality, as I have already had occasion to point out, everything moves in total chaos, and so these benefits, when they exist, appear in a patchy, leopard-spotted way, creating great imbalances between territories and also frustration among the operators. Because it is clear that, in a system that tends to level downwards, the most penalised are those who put forward a quality offering, which, besides being paradoxical, is counterproductive, because it fails to realise the potential that dance, and the dance school in particular, is able to express.
To hold a territory means taking part in the competitions and initiatives, even the low-level ones, that the territory puts on, because if you do not go there is already someone else ready to take your place, and so, in order to stay standing, you are forced to run; you are like a juggler, and if you stop, everything collapses.
But how did it come about that from innovators and experimenters we have become tightrope walkers? It is hard to pinpoint a single event or a precise date; certainly, at a certain point the cultural policies of this country lost their vision, their capacity for planning. They became subservient to events, large and small, trusting in the mythical economic returns. Television, the greatest cultural industry in the country, stopped offering quality dance. Vittoria Ottolenghi's Maratona d'Estate was unforgettable. A kind of dance appeared that has nothing to do with the great tradition of European ballet or the dizzying experiments of contemporary dance; it all comes down to movements, behaviours and clothing that are coarse and off-key: “Grande Fratello” set the trend.
The great ballets have ended up in time slots dedicated to insomniacs; something has been saved in live performance, but in this country the Theatre has always been reserved for a narrow elite.
In this turmoil, those best equipped culturally have tried to build a dam, but by now the siege is overwhelming and little time is left. We operators can choose between a frenzied, tarantula-bitten path, running from one competition to another, from one workshop to the next, adding a thousand activities within the school to show that you are modern, up to date, in step with the times, or we can try to hold firm to our skills and convictions, trying to bring to reason those who knock at our door and explaining that growing as a human being, culturally and professionally, entails patience, humility and a spirit of sacrifice. The workshop, the encounter with Masters of great renown, are obviously important, but only when offered at the right moment and in the right doses. In this last trench we have taken up position, and we resist, doing what we believe to be right and useful.

Postscript

From the Lectio magistralis given by Pina Bausch in Bologna on 25 November 1999, on the occasion of the conferral of the honorary degree in Performing Arts.

«Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost»
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to begin with a story. Once, in Greece, I went to visit some Roma families. We sat down together and talked; at a certain point everyone began to dance and I was expected to take part. I was very afraid and had the feeling that I would not be able to. Then a young girl, perhaps about twelve years old, came up to me and asked me again and again to dance together with them.
She kept saying: «Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost». Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.

Born in Morcone (BN) on 10/12/1958, he lives in Perugia, married with two children. He holds a degree in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Perugia. From 1982 to 1987 he worked as an actor and technician at the “Teatro Studio 3” in Perugia. He has always combined his studies and work with social and cultural volunteering. He is currently president of the Centrodanza Association. He thinks of culture as the acquisition of tools for understanding and acting in the real world.