Dancing on stage for an audience is frightening. It removes the mirrored fourth wall and opens up a black cavern into the audience, one that is in the dark. They can see you, but you cannot see them, except for a vague outline of heads. Sometimes you can see only the glowing exit sign in the far back of the orchestra section. This means that there is often nothing concrete to focus on when spotting in turns.
The stage ends abruptly in a cliff over the orchestra pit. Taped marks on the floor for guidance and dancers have to rely on proprioception – your sense of where your body is in space. You can also use other dancers for visual cues, and you can gauge the distances from the wings.
This kind of dancing on a stage at the front of a theatre with a proscenium arch and the unseen audience in front of it, is not an intimate experience. A dancer on stage can feel the moving, breathing, coughing, whispering, clapping audience in their seats. But the audience is not an integral part of the dance. Not really. They are there to be entertained, to be moved, or to do one’s duty as a good date. They are there to criticize. They are there to judge.
Unlike communal dancing where audiences engage in the dance through rhythmic participation or call and response, such as in breakdance circles or dancing in the arena-like Ancient Greek theatres, Western fine arts theatres for ballet creates two classes, the performers and those for whom the dance is performed. It recalls the aristocratic origins of Romantic ballet, where dance was performed for royalty and their courts by performers who were less-than-royal and treated accordingly.
When I danced on a ballet stage, I didn’t really dance for the audience. I danced for myself. And I danced for the dance itself, as interpreted by the director, who would give us notes on what to change or revise in our performances. I hoped that if I engaged earnestly with the dance, following my own intuition on what the dance meant and was, complying with the director’s notes, that the audience would see. I never thought about what was needed for the audience to see all that there was to see. I just assumed that they would and could see.
Audience members with ballet training themselves can see most of what’s there to be seen. This is because the necessary experience to know what to look for in terms of the technical and aesthetic standards of the form. They also have trained their perceptions to a fine-tuned level over years of focusing on ballet-specific movements and their qualities. If they have spent some years watching ballet attentively as audience members, too, they might also be able to compare versions of the same ballets, differences in director’s interpretations, differences in choreographies, differences in the way dance companies and individual dancers perform them.
To see what there is to see as part of ballet for non-trained dancers, however, requires some pre-seeing work. They need not know what the names of the steps and positions are. They need not know how the dancers have trained or how they are feeling. But at a minimum they need to know what to attend to as part of a ballet, and what not. When you take a small child to an art museum for the first time, for example, they might focus on a light switch on the wall or the scratches on the floor. But these aren’t part of the art (unless they are, explicitly, as in some contemporary art).
But wait! Someone will claim. Ballet dancers can’t be impervious to audiences. If this were true, why perform at all? Why not just dance in studios for themselves? In short, I think ballet dancers perform not for actual audiences, with all the limitations of background and education in dance that they have, but for ideal audiences, for the ballet community that is trained in what to look for and how to see. This is, perhaps, why ballet is not, and has never been popular. It requires too much for the general populace. The achievement required to garner all the riches ballet offers, either as a performer or an audience member, is worth the sacrifice for those involved. But unless the general public (including all genders) is trained in dance like they are trained in sports (as both participants and spectators) it will never be popular.