Contemporary Dance Programming Expansion Generates Both Standing Ovations and Strongly Worded Substack Posts
LINCOLN CENTER, NEW YORK — Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts announced the inaugural Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival, a new programming initiative running through July that brings international dance companies and multiple world premieres to Alice Tully Hall and a new outdoor series called Dance Encounters on Hearst Plaza, and within 48 hours of the announcement had generated more than 200 Substack posts, which is the contemporary equivalent of editorials and which Lincoln Center’s communications team is reading with the specific attention of an institution that knows its audience includes people with strong opinions and internet access.
The Festival: Its Scope
The Contemporary Dance Festival features companies from eleven countries, nine world premieres, four New York premieres, and what the programming notes describe as “a curatorial vision centered on the body as a site of political and aesthetic inquiry,” which is accurate and important language and which has already generated one Substack post titled “Is Lincoln Center Ready for Bodies as Political Inquiry?” and a response post titled “Was That Question Necessary?” and a response to the response titled “All Questions Are Necessary,” which is contemporary arts discourse at its most generative and its most exhausting simultaneously.
The outdoor Dance Encounters series on Hearst Plaza brings contemporary works to a free, open-air setting where passersby can encounter serious dance without purchasing tickets, which is the Lincoln Center equivalent of SummerStage’s democratic programming model and which, in practice, means that office workers on lunch breaks from Midtown have been stopping to watch a Danish company perform a forty-minute piece about bureaucratic grief, which they describe as either “fascinating” or “relatable,” depending on their current workload.
The International Companies: Represented
Among the festival’s featured ensembles is a Brazilian company whose work combines capoeira, carnival movement traditions, and contemporary choreographic frameworks; a South Korean group whose piece examines diaspora identity through a hybrid of traditional court dance and hip-hop vocabulary; and a Dutch company whose work, described in the program notes as “a rigorous examination of stillness,” involves performers remaining nearly motionless for significant portions of the 75-minute running time, which the company’s artistic director calls “an invitation to a different relationship with time” and which audience members who fell asleep during the Amsterdam premiere called “effective.”
The Dutch company has received four-star reviews from every European outlet that covered its world premiere and is expected to be the festival’s most discussed work, which is generally true of pieces that are either very good or very challenging, and this one appears to be both, which in contemporary dance is the optimal combination.
The New York Dance Community: Present and Accounted For
New York’s dance community, which is large, opinionated, underemployed relative to its talent level, and deeply invested in what Lincoln Center programs and how it talks about what it programs, has received the festival with a mixture of enthusiasm and the critique that is inseparable from enthusiasm in a field where argument is a form of love.
A choreographer named Marco, whose company performs regularly at smaller downtown venues and who attended the festival’s opening night, said the programming was “genuinely impressive” and that the presence of international companies at Lincoln Center scale “matters for the field.” He added that the Substack discourse has been “a lot,” but that discourse is participation, and participation means people care, and people caring about dance in New York is always, in the final analysis, a good thing.
An audience member at the Danish company’s premiere, a retired teacher named Gloria who has held Lincoln Center memberships since 1984 and who attended the performance on the recommendation of her granddaughter, described the piece as “very different from the ballet I usually see, and I think that’s the point, and I think I’ll be thinking about it for a while.” This is the ideal response to contemporary dance, and Gloria has apparently been the ideal audience member for forty years without being given credit for it, which this article is attempting to partially remedy.
The Substack Ecosystem: Thriving
The 200-plus Substack posts generated by the Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival announcement represent a specific form of New York arts engagement: the long-form critical response, produced by people who care enough about dance to write 800 words about it at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, published to audiences of 300 to 30,000 subscribers who also care enough about dance to read 800 words about it at whatever time they encounter it in their inbox. This ecosystem of independent criticism, which has grown substantially since the contraction of traditional arts journalism, performs an important function: it keeps the discourse alive, detailed, and argumentative in productive ways. Lincoln Center, which has an institutional relationship to dance that goes back to its founding in 1962, has learned to read this discourse carefully, because it is where the field thinks, and where the field thinks eventually influences what the field funds, programs, and validates. The Substack posts are not noise. They are signal, even the ones that are slightly wrong.
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