Dance

Unlike the fine arts, dance does not enjoy an infinitely large market which could serve as an indicator of quality. To identify quality in dance, it is necessary to understand the meanderings, self-infatuations, strategies and blind alleys, feelings and ideas which transform an amorphous notion into a concrete work.

It is widely believed that contemporary art simply cannot be evaluated. The kind of art that is created nowadays is so specialized and so individual, so caught up in its own functional relationships and milieus that it is at best the market which can give some indication of its value: anything that sells for a lot of money at auction must surely be of good quality. Yet even though there are many reasons to question this criterion, how could it be applied to the reality of contemporary dance? After all, there is no infinitely large market here which could serve as a yardstick. (Which is why many choreographers and dance artists tend to choose the visual arts, opera or film – disciplines in which money flows far more abundantly and in which works are much better funded than in dance.)

But if monetary value is not a satisfactory indicator, what measures are available instead? How can "quality" in contemporary dance be evaluated, or indeed identified in the first place? What, in other words, makes dance art? And who decides?

Accuracy and clarity

Of course, there are norms according to which certain "products" can be recognized as dance, and it is these norms which determine in the first place what counts as dance. These norms may perhaps not be as hard to determine as the products which emerge at the end of the process would sometimes lead one to believe. After all, for a work to be created, accuracy and clarity are needed. Consequently, "characteristics" are required and the means to identify them. If it were not for this point at which different ways of thinking, different styles of perception, different interpretations and different views of the world clash, all efforts to create art would be in vain. For the work itself has virtually no meaning in its own right. To achieve significance, it must enter into a dialogue.

And it is this exchange, this dialogue between that which we call a work and those who recognize this work as such, who understand it and, at best, appreciate it and possibly wish to preserve it, that is the domain in which "quality" emerges. Beforehand this quality does not exist at all, though it is certainly anticipated, and it is in this anticipation that "taste" becomes evident.

Taste

At the end of the 18th century, the philosopher, aesthete and (dramatic) poet Friedrich Schiller evoked the "silent work of taste" which would raise the individual to a better state of being. "It is on the road of beauty that we stroll towards freedom", he wrote. To reach this "road to freedom", however, taste is needed. Taste is thus an important element of the distinction strategies which at the beginning of the bourgeois era served to raise the individual to the subjective and the subjective to a category, because only the subjective raised in this manner is in a position to distinguish (aesthetic) quality.

At the heart of these chambers of good taste, of academicism, of connoisseurship, and of expertise, one cultivates, destroys and fragments, creates unity and difference, takes up and rejects. In short, one creates that which is pleasing and is "allowed". In this sense, art and taste were able to become the drill ground for aesthetic and indeed social differentiation, and have remained this to the present day.

Dwindling norms

The difficulty of identifying quality, in other words, is wide-ranging because it involves recognizing and acknowledging the quality or qualities of a choreography, a piece of dance or an artistic approach. It is necessary to understand the meanderings, self-infatuations, strategies and blind alleys, feelings and ideas which transform an amorphous notion into a concrete work. In former times this may have been easier because people were able to base their judgement on established norms and rules, and on unchallenged standards. Nowadays, all normativity has either disappeared or is at the very least disputable. Thus new characteristics and "qualities" have to be devised and put forward over and over again. Consequently, artistic evaluation takes place on a highly subjective basis. To this extent it resembles the works themselves, which aim to stand out from the crowd on account of their "originality" and the fact that they are unprecedented and do not conform to any canons, rules, instructions or conventions.

This is the point, however, where the circle of liberal abandonment of all quality standards comes to an end. After all, each individual work and each individual glance takes us back into the arena of definition. And thus every programme policy, every series of events, every jury, every advisory committee (and of course every review, every essay and every seminar) follows a process of including and excluding. On the basis of this selection, an answer emerges to the question as to what in fact is allowed in dance and who wants what. And – as a discussion participant noted during this year's Vienna International Dance Festival ImPulsTanz – why certain forms, certain names and certain styles do attain a (relatively) high value on the choreography industry market, while others are ignored. Quality is there, without any doubt. But people do not always want to see it ...