Female

Washington, D.C.

www.arielbellydance.com

"I hate academies. I hate fixed ideas of what a thing should be, of how it should be done. I don't like imposing rules, because the person, the artist, must do what he feels is right, what he--as an individual--feels he must do. If we establish an academy, there can be no future for the modern dance. An art should be constantly changing; it cannot have fixed rules.

The trouble with the modern dance now is that it is trying to be respectable. The founders of the modern dance were rebels; their followers are bourgeois. The younger generation is too anxious to please, too eager to be accepted. For art, this is death. To young dancers, I want to say: 'Do what you feel you are, not what you think you ought to be. Go ahead and be a bastard. Then you can be an artist.'

The modern dance should be non-conformist. We should not try to create a tradition. The ballet has done that, and that's fine--for the ballet. But not for us. Our strength lies in our lack of tradition. Some say that the big change came in the late 1920s, and now is the time for the modern dance to assimilate and solidify. That's all wrong, because it is like building on still another tradition. Without change there can be no growth, and not enough change is going on today.

My quarrel with this generation is that they copy their teachers, and it's their own fault. They don't want freedom; they want to be told what to do. Why don't they realize they don't have to believe everything their teacher says? They ought to disagree; they ought to argue.

Of course it's not all the fault of the student. Too often, teachers are merely polite when they should be provocative. They ought to shock. Look at Louis Horst. At eighty, he was still fresh and bold. The good teacher does not teach rules; he stimulates. He shows the students what he knows and inspires them--to go and do something else.

Learning rules cannot produce an artist. What is an artist? What is the nature of the creative process? These are things we can't know; they can't be explained. The creative teacher opens doors for his students to see what life is, what they are. They have to take it from there."

---Anna Sokolow, student of Martha Graham