Stop Asking Dancers to Smile and Start Asking Why We Deserve Serious Art

I watched a stunning new contemporary dance piece last week where a dancer spent eight minutes in complete stillness, face neutral, while the rest of the ensemble moved in fractured patterns around them. It was mesmerizing and unsettling. During the Q&A, someone asked—I wish I was making this up—"Why wasn't anyone smiling? It felt sad."

This is the thing that drives me insane about how we treat dance, especially contemporary work that refuses to entertain us in the traditional sense. We've collectively decided that dance exists to be joyful, inspirational, and aesthetically pleasing—like emotional wallpaper for our eyes. The moment a dancer shows a different emotional state, suddenly they're being "sad" or "angry" at us personally, as though their face is a direct message about whether we're having a good time.

Here's my actual opinion: this is cowardice dressed up as preference.

We don't ask paintings to smile. We don't complain that a photograph of grief looks too serious. We accept that visual art can investigate difficult emotional terrain without providing us immediate catharsis. But the second a human body becomes the medium, we want reassurance. We want to see that someone is okay with entertaining us, that they're enjoying the performance of their own art. It's the conversational equivalent of someone asking "are you mad at me?" when you're just thinking about something else.

The best contemporary dancers I've seen—the ones doing genuinely innovative work—are the ones who've stopped caring whether their face is providing you emotional guidance. They move in ways that feel urgent and real. Sometimes that's joyful. Sometimes it's strange. Sometimes it's brutally honest in a way that makes audiences uncomfortable, which is exactly when dance becomes interesting.

Comfort is the enemy of revelation. If every dance performance is designed to make you feel good about being alive, then dance becomes luxury entertainment—beautiful, sure, but ultimately safe. The revolutionary stuff happens when artists decide that your comfort is less important than their truth.

This doesn't mean all dance should be grim. But we need to stop treating a neutral or serious face on a dancer like a personal attack. That dancer isn't performing sadness *at* you. They're performing the human experience, which contains multitudes. Sometimes it looks like joy. Sometimes it looks like someone thinking very hard about something. Sometimes it just looks like a body moving through space without performing its own emotional validity for your benefit.

Give serious work the same grace you'd give to any serious art. Let it be what it is. Your smile isn't required. Neither is theirs.