The Quiet Dignity of Dance We're All Too Busy to Notice

I watched a contemporary dance piece last week that had maybe forty people in the audience, and I kept thinking: this person spent six months of their life on this, and we're treating it like a free sample at Costco.

Here's what I'm tired of: we've split dance into two camps. There's the stuff that gets consumed—TikTok choreography that's designed to be replicable, viral, disposable. You watch it on your phone while doing something else. It's fine! It's often joyful! But it's also fundamentally not asking much of you. Then there's Broadway, or your local ballet company, which has marketing budgets and prestige and people actually show up. Also fine.

But there's this entire universe of dance happening in black boxes and converted warehouses and college theaters where choreographers are doing something genuinely difficult: they're asking audiences to feel something without a narrative to hide behind, without movie-star bodies or rhinestones or a plot you can follow on your phone. They're just saying: watch me move, and think about what that means.

The piece I saw involved a woman, minimal lighting, and about twenty minutes of sustained movement that was technically virtuosic but also—and this is the part that killed me—completely unsentimental. There was no dramatic music swelling at the right moments. No backstory to make you care. Just her body, her choices, her breath. The audience had to actually *work* to understand what we were watching.

And that's exactly why nobody goes.

We've been trained to want our art pre-interpreted, with emotional cues built in. We want to know what we're supposed to feel before we feel it. A TikTok dance tells you exactly what to enjoy about itself. Broadway tells you a story. But experimental dance says: I'm going to move for twenty minutes, and you figure out what it means.

That's not elitism. That's actually the opposite. It's an artist saying: I trust you to bring yourself to this. I'm not going to manipulate you.

The frustrating part is that when people actually experience this work—when they stop scrolling, show up, pay attention—they're often moved in ways they weren't expecting. There's something about live bodies in a room, working at the edges of what movement can express, that gets under your skin differently.

So here's my position: seek out the dance you've never heard of. The thing with no marketing budget and a 7 p.m. Sunday showing. Sit there. Be bored if you need to be. Let yourself feel confused. Stay for the whole thing.

I promise you'll see something you won't see on your feed.