PdT: How can you get someone into watching dance
On Pas de Trois this week, we are asking how you can get someone into watching dance? Well, if I only knew..
Although I’m basically clueless, I’m going to try to answer the question anyway;
First of all, go see a performance. YouTube is full of great dancing videos, but, fortunately, I’d say, it doesn’t give you anything near the experience of watching some really cool show in a real theater. I know, it’s expensive, I know, it takes a lot of time, I know, you have to dress up; IT’S WORTH IT (and HEY, you can have a beer in the brakes)! A good performance is an experience for life!
Help us fill those seats…
If you are bringing someone to their first dance performance in their life, I do believe that you should pick it with care. You don’t want to put someone in the position where they were expecting MTV-booty-shaking, and end up with watching girls run around in white dresses for four hours (My friends words, not mine. He was watching Swan Lake for the first time in his life..). Check out my column Bedtime Stories, I try to explain the plots (or the lack of such) in the most famous ballets out there. It’s far from a complete guide (yet), but it should give you an idea…
But how can we make all those “normies” (an expression stolen from the hilarious – at least for us with strange dancing-humor – page thin and dizzy) out there want to go to see dance? I wish I knew. I mean, they could start by reading my blog! Not to brag, but after all, the idea behind it was to provide people with an insight to the amazing, but sometimes closed world I’m living in, where fairies and witches and broken ankles are everyday business. I hope that if someone, completely unfamiliar with ballet, got lost surfing the net, and ended up on my page, that they’d want to go see a performance, or at least a clip on internet afterwards (Maybe I was a little harsh on YouTube earlier, after all, it is still better than nothing). What I want to say here is that, if I can achieve that someone got inspired by Tights and Tiaras to go see a ballet performance, all the time and effort and hair-loss and sleepless nights I put in to it is well worth it!
If anyone, especially if it is a male, with a classic “nothing-interests-me-besides-football-and-beer-and-dancing-is-for-faggots” comes your way, on the other hand, I do have an easy solution to help widen their perspectives, which will be the end of my contribution to this weeks question:
1. Strap the man down in a (comfortable) chair in front of the biggest monitor nearby.
2. For christ sake, give him a beer, he’s not used to absorb culture without it.
3. Crank up the volume and…
4. Put on this performSance from Jo Strømgren Company, who I wrote a post on a while back. THe performance is up on the www in it’s entire form, and Mr. Strømgren, a wise man, realized 45 minutes is the longest amount of time most men can keep concentrated (if you didn’t realize already, it is the length of one half of the great game of soccer). So therefore, the performance is exactly that long – A ballet celebrating soccer in one half of a soccer-match.
Believe me, that man will be looking for more ballet for the rest of his life! 
Ta-Ta
H
