To whom dancer performs is crucial subject for those who are concerned with dance. There are two kinds of dance. One is for those who wish to enjoy it not for someone but for themselves such as in club or in discotheque. Another is performed by those who intend to entertain people who are watching them. We call these people “audience”. Shortly, whether there are the audience or not is the major division of two types of dance. Of course the former also has potential audience, however the latter has more definite distinction between the performers and the audience.
Contemporary dance belongs to the latter.
It would be hard to define what is contemporary dance. It shares a history with classic ballet and modern dance partially, and is connected with fine art and philosophy in any era. It has a obvious boundary from folk dance or some specific forms of dance such as flamenco, Latin and African dance, but it can be tolerant to be synthesized with such forms of dance.
Contemporary dance also often takes account of “contemporary” topic in its content. Nevertheless there is no such a genre “contemporary dance”, there are mere some dance pieces which can be called only by this name. Since the dance got audience, it has begun to choose people who can potentially become their audience. Frankly speaking, the chosen people as audience are those who can come to the theatre and/or those who can pay the entrance. The theatres usually exist in the center of the city and the entrance fee is equal or more expensive than a meal.
Contemporary dance is supported by this basic scheme.
It is true that many of dance performances are performed not in conventional theatres now a days. Nonetheless, they have yet remained the same scheme in it. I, as a dance maker of contemporary dance such “not-possible-to-categorize” dance, start a dance project titled “Dance for Someone”, in which I intend to shift the scheme above.
The objective of this project is simple.
We dance for someone who are not likely to come to see contemporary dance in the theatre and/or who consider that the entrance fee is less value than daily expense. For example, we go to some parks in day and night to find the people who enjoying chatting or relaxing and offer them our dance performance. What we dance is changed in each case, in each situation we dance. What our audience are doing, what kind of time and place, how many of them, such factors drastically determine our contents of dance. Thus our dance must be improvisation. It should not have pre-fixed forms.