In the age of TikTok, Live Dance Matters
A few weekends ago, I saw New York City Ballet in Balanchine’s Jewels. After the performance, I had the opportunity to meet some of the dancers and step on the stage at Lincoln Center.
I could still feel the body heat and energy of the breathtaking performance I had just watched. The power of it all had me truly appreciating and thinking about live dance.
With dance performances just a screen away, it can be easy to watch a clip online and feel like you’ve seen all you need. Social media has made our access to dance easier than ever before. What we see through a camera on a screen is flat and only two-dimensional, whereas live performance is three-dimensional. On a screen, you can see the choreography and hear the music, but there is a special aliveness about experiencing dance live. No screen will ever live up to a live performance! We know this, and scientists are proving it.
A study by Cambridge University Press on the experience of watching dance found that audience members showed greater synchronization in their brain activity when experiencing a live performance together than when watching a recording individually. This is likely due to what is known as “kinesthetic empathy”, or the bodily response to watching somebody else move. While there is still much to learn about this phenomenon, the research points toward something many dancers and audience members already know: there is something important about actually being in the room.
When you watch a dancer live, you aren't just seeing their movement; you are experiencing it. You get to hear a dancer's feet land on the floor, notice their breath, see the physical effort behind a movement, feel the temperature changes in the room, and sense the energy that is left behind in the space. There is a reason we sometimes find ourselves moving along with a dancer without even realizing it. Watching another person move can create a physical and emotional response in our own bodies. Dance has a unique ability to communicate through movement, even when no words are spoken.
A recording captures a performance and can be a very useful tool to share and remember choreography, but it cannot recreate the live experience of being there. A live performance happens only once, in that particular space, at that particular moment. The dancers are responding to one another, the music, the stage, and even the energy of the audience. These moments become part of that performance, and they will never happen in the same way again. That makes it very special.
Going to see dance is also about sharing an experience with other people. There is something powerful about sitting in a theater surrounded by an audience that is seeing, hearing, and feeling the same thing at the same time. The dancers affect the audience, but the audience also affects the dancers. You don't have to be a dancer or know anything about ballet, modern dance, or choreography to be part of that experience.
So, why go see dance live?
Because you might experience something you couldn't have experienced anywhere else. You can watch dance online. You can scroll past a beautiful performance on social media. You can replay a video as many times as you want, but you can't recreate the feeling of sitting in a room with other people, watching dancers move through space in real time. Walking around a sculpture and seeing all the texture and depth can’t be compared to seeing that same sculpture in a picture. The same happens with dance.
So the next time you see a performance happening in your community, consider getting a ticket and taking a friend. You don't have to understand every step or every choreographic choice. You really don't even have to consider yourself a “dance person.”
Just be there and experience live dance.
You might be surprised by what you feel!
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