Rants & Raves: how can dance education compete with the power of the media?

What attitude does mainstream America have toward dance, and why should dance professionals care? As someone who monitors the media closely, I have become increasingly disturbed about the low reputation of the fine arts with the mass audience to whom the powerful medium of political talk radio caters. Conservative hosts and callers regularly deride modern art as a scare and dismiss artists as frivolous, elitist, immoral, sacrilegious, and anti-American.

These attitudes have real-life consequences when local or state governments curtail arts funding as a wasteful extravagance. Even in Philadelphia, with its resident symphony orchestra, ballet and modern dance companies, City Hall last year shockingly eliminated its Office of Arts and Culture. Nationally, there has been an alarming trend for the cutting of arts programs from public schools, which disastrously affects working-class students whose families cannot afford private lessons.

Dance is the most fragile of the arts in that it cannot flourish in isolation or with long fallow periods. Any rupture is deeply destructive. Steady financing is critical to provide facilities, maintain companies, and nurture the link between teacher and student down the generations.

Dance in the U.S. has never enjoyed the prestige it has in Europe and Russia, where state and civic funding is a given. One reason for this is that classical ballet, which descends from the royal court world, is gloriously embedded in national history. It is remarkable, for example, that even after the Bolsheviks toppled the czars, the socialist Soviet Union preserved ballet as the Russian people's cultural heritage.

America, in contrast, never had or wanted a titled aristocracy. Despite the waves of ethnic immigration since then, our cultural roots stubbornly remain in New England Puritanism, with its business-oriented practicality, sexual prudery, and suspicion of art and beauty. The Puritan residue in America still manifests itself in uneasiness about nudity and in periodic calls for censorship of art and entertainment. The frontier code of masculinity also survives, impugning the virility of male dancers and making it difficult to attract American boys to dance schools.

Popular dance, from jitterbug to disco and hip hop, has a strong presence in the U.S. Tap, for example, which has massively revived, is respected by mainstream audiences for its dynamic, upbeat athleticism and its evocation of classic all-American movies. It's art dance that the general public has trouble with. Most people living outside the sophisticated metropolises or university centers will never see a professional production of live dance. Despite its tremendously loyal and knowledgeable core audience, serious dance simply doesn't exist for most Americans.

Unlike the visual arts, dance lacks the public relations vehicle of blockbuster museum shows to spread the word. We no longer have a Rudolf Nureyev or a Mikhail Baryshnikov in his prime, charismatic superstars whose offstage adventures were covered by glossy, general-interest magazines. Primetime TV variety shows (such as "The Ed Sullivan Show" or "Omnibus"), which once showcased dance, are long gone. Public broadcasting features opera or popular shows like Riverdance but rarely airs productions of classical ballet or modern dance. Music videos have also waned since file 1980s, when Michael Jackson and the Graham-trained Madonna made news through dance.

As with many fields (including literary criticism), professionals may not realize the degree to which they are talking mainly to each other. Outreach is not just about fostering dance instruction but about spreading dance consciousness to the public at large. Dance education should be built into the educational curriculum, so that even those who will never set foot in a dance studio will have a basic knowledge of dance history.

What is desperately needed is a standardized middle-school or high-school level elective that focuses on dance. Ideally multicultural in orientation, it would trace dance from its birth in religious ritual and folk dance to the evolution of classical ballet and modern dance styles. It would be useful to incorporate Asian martial arts into this survey to enlarge the common definition of dance.

The National Endowment for the Arts or a consortium of private foundations should commission the creation of a provisional dance history course, outlined in a handbook buttressed by video and web resources. Sample syllabi could be adapted by school districts nationwide at minimal expense. But in the meantime, dance professionals themselves, perhaps through local lectures or newspaper articles, must seek ways to promote not just the technique but the vision of dance to their wider communities.

Camille Paglia is the University Professor off Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her latest book is Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems (Pantheon).