Cool is good. But does anyone actually want to admit we are trying to be good? No. It's much cooler to be bad. But if trying to be bad is cool then shouldn't we not follow the herd and be good? It's damn confusing. It's damn subjective. It doesn't matter.
This dance project exists in the gap between dance in the Contemporary Dance world and dance in society. It started at a point of frustration with how formulaic good is in the dance industry, how insular its own world can be.
So I started thinking about trying to present the "bad". Using every clichéd element of contemporary dance production. Squares of light, complicated abstract movement phrases made by using letters of the alphabet, androgynous costumes, solely open parallel stance, empty expressions, stripped back emotions, perhaps abstraction and ambiguity parading as art... And then this might be a ridiculous and ironic attempt at “good.” And then be "cool." Which is what we want, sort of, at least.
But there was a hiccup on the way. I discovered the unstoppable and inescapable force of Celine Dion. And she has opened up a can of love worms.
What is Celine Dion? She is the ultimate manifestation of love in the commercial world. 200 songs in her career, and 198 devoted to the exploration of love. Between a man and a woman. She is amongst the top ten of highest selling female recording artists of all time. Her fans love her. Her whole life is about love. Her whole world is about how much she loves her 14 brothers and sisters, her mother, her fans, her collaborators, her home country, her music and her manager- Rene Angelil. The only man she's ever known, 28 years her senior and her lover since she was just 16. The perfect anti-dote to “good” as choreography, make a dance about love?
In her career Celine has played the game, and she has played it hard. She has cashed in on how much love she has to give by overtly using the commercial wheels of publicity and promotion to propel her to heights politicians, actors, musicians, directors and Big Brother contestants can only dream of. But the public has lapped all of this up. Underneath Sony, the Academy Awards, the Grammy’s, the Juno’s, the world tours, the magazine articles and autobiographies she reaches deeply, tenderly and intimately into the hearts and souls of her billions of fans.
You ask a person vaguely interested in being cool, what they think of Celine Dion, throw in a phrase such as "Celine Dion will have a bigger legacy than John Lennon in 100 years time" and one gets extreme responses of absolute disgust. Similar reactions to when you mention George Bush. But for Celine, like George Bush, there must be some out there who like her, actually a lot. By dismissing fellow artists like Celine Dion are we highlighting a narrow window of acceptable topics we are willing to consider to work with? Can we equate our dismissal with Celine Dion to a lack of investigation in to the mechanics of the mainstream? The mainstream is after all the dominant force of the world whose welfare drives both global politics and economy. Our quest to destroy the axis of evil, is at the same time, an act of support for Celine Dion?
So my entry point into this world is via the mainstream as opposed to my dance education. And in our cultural climate, one cannot get more mainstream than YouTube. The perfect place to explore love and Celine.
However using YouTube serves more of a purpose than purely being a way to explore the mainstream. When living in London, working 9-7, not having access to studio space or any money to fund a project YouTube turns out to be quite handy. Using the only resources available to an unsupported choreographer: a laptop, a video camera, friends and their living spaces (kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms – in some instances all three combined into one) making dance for YouTube is perfect. It was a way of making dance that actually worked with how one lives, as a dancer in 2007. It didn’t require any of the resources one normally considers to be necessary for dance production.
All in all there are 43 videos that created the stage performance of Let’s Talk About Love. This generated, and we’re still counting, 16 249 on-line audience members of Let’s Talk About Love. As well as the 100 people that saw it live on the 1st of February at The Place in London.
This allowed the performance to be understood differently. The production can be followed; more information than the 200 characters available in the program can be shared. The performance can be more than 20 minutes of stage time and be seen by thousands of people who may have never stepped inside a Contemporary Dance theatre. It also provides a new set of parameters by which to shape the mode of dance production. One is measuring success through the number of hits or views. An Internet audience has very different desires to that of a live audience, and then when these desires are then shifted off-line to a live performance by real people, something new is occurring. Something highly reflective of the day-to-day technology and communication methods we engage with thus, the cultural climate that surrounds us.
So when we combine dance, the familiarity of Celine Dion, under rehearsed performance informed by the parameters of YouTube it provides more than just a murmur about performance. It's re-creating Vegas on a small scale with a big smile and big hair and sweaty dance gear. It's A Chorus Line learnt in our living rooms, it's synthetic music production that can rumble the heart and the belly like when saying "I Do" at the alter. Let’s Talk About Love.
