The courage required to break the rules

creative insurrection or evolution?

I love what modern dance stands for. I love what Isadora Duncan, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham were trying to do (err – did). It’s not that I don’t believe in the mission.

It’s just the dance moves hurt my eyes.

Watching someone with impeccable form, take a perfect leg extension and then bend their knee, makes my stomach turn. To break the laws or invert them, destroys the fabric of everything.

Her elbows in this piece make me insane. Lift! LIFT!!! 

But that was the point, wasn’t it?

Modern dance was revolutionary because it was a giant middle finger to traditionalism, constraint, and restriction. It created space for more body types and “forbidden” taboo movements. It allowed color, flavor, pain, and happiness to erupt onstage. 

They even went offstage, as in this 1965 performance in the streets of Paris and London.

There’s a moment (min 1:05) where this dancer loses her balance and looks like she’s falling as if something’s wrong. She’s bent over, whirling around like a kid who is oblivious to the fact that she’s in public and people are watching.

She’s in control, but you wouldn’t know it because the point of modern dance is to make you a little uncomfortable.

The irony is that to perform these pieces you had to be a master of your craft. You had to be a master technician. You had to know the rules to break them. Some of the best modern dancers of their day were classically trained.

You see the same thing in acting. To act badly, on purpose, requires a tremendously talented actor. With music. John Batiste’s respect for the craft and his classic training at Juliard allowed him to expand on the classics to create this. With writing, you see examples like Mark Twain who blew our socks off when he made vernacular language come alive on the page. Each of these creators mastered how to perform their craft the traditional way, then figured out how to make it better – or more their own.

To invert the norms, you must first master the norms.

But then you don’t let them trap you.

Modern dance was about freedom from constraint.

It might not be my cup of tea, but what modern dance did for dance and society was a big deal. It destroyed our obsession with perfection, broke rank, and brought humanity back onto the stage. It stood for personal expression and improvisation. It allowed us to feel something again (even if, in my case, that feeling was “UGH”).

Too many of us get stuck trying to be the perfect ballerina. Obsessed with “getting it right” when we should first consider what it is we’re trying to do. Is it ballet or is it something else? 

This obsession with “getting it right” is why we waste so much time on things that don’t matter.

If you’re curious about your Dream Project, learn about it. But if you’re searching for templates, trying to follow the rules, aiming desperately to do it “right,” you are going to fail. There’s a reason few young people go to the ballet, but everyone is watching Connor McKenzie and Harper Watters on Instagram.

We didn’t stop loving dance, we stopped trying to be perfect.

The dance that survived paid attention to the zeitgeist. Hip-hop lives on where ballet stagnated because it dared to be something different. It took the straight lines of a perfect relevé (where you stand on your toes, creating an unbreakable straight line from the top of your head through your torso, down your hips, to your toes) and said, watch this and while dropping into a squat!

Hip-hop took the lightness and airiness of ballet and took it to the floor. 

It was bold, innovative, controversial, and beautiful.

That is the skill we need to cultivate in ourselves. Boldness.

For most of us, our form and technique are okay (or they’re good enough because this isn’t the Royal Ballet Academy, and good enough works just fine here). 

It’s our courage that needs work.

Courage to learn convention and then go someplace new. To plug into the zeitgeist. To try things that might not work. To disappoint some people. All in service of creating space for what is – and what might be. 

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As always, thanks for reading and thanks for being here.

M+K