On Technology and Dance

[…] Until the technology affords some way of handling three-dimensional images moving through space, it’s always going to feel as though technology is offering only the icon, the translation of what the experience really is. With television, for example, the more people are exposed to dance in that format, the more they want to attend live performances, because a televised performance simply gives them a little appetizer and then they want a real meal. So technology is nothing but supportive from that point of view. There used to be folks who worried that television would replace film and, before that, that film would replace theater. It just doesn’t work that way.

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It seems to be everybody’s goal to use technology to replace any necessity for the body to function, and that’s a problem. As technology affords people more and more ways of utilizing their intelligence, they are going to need stronger and stronger reminders of their physical nature.

The body has always been the fundamental component of dance. Whatever is to come in our technological development is only going to reinforce the fact that we desperately need dance to remind us of our physicality. If dance becomes the cultural ingredient that offers what hoeing and sweeping and gardening once did, then it will always be retained because it delivers such beautiful results.