The A.W.A.R.D. Show, a Discussion

Coriolis Dance Collective, photo by Michael Rioux.

Sunday night, I attended the finale of The A.W.A.R.D. Show with Amy Mikel, the new dance writer for Seattlest.com. Following the competition, which ultimately awarded a $10,000 first prize to Amelia Reeber, with $1,000 awarded to the runners-up, Catherine Cabeen and Deborah Wolf, Amy and I had a long discussion about the show and what it means to artists and audiences to place choreographers in competition for an an audience vote.

Amy So what did you think of The A.W.A.R.D. Show?

Jeremy The first response I had to the closing night of The A.W.A.R.D. Show is that--not to sound mean--the line-up was uneven. For me, it was a contest between Catherine Cabeen and Amelia Reeber. Deborah Wolf's piece was definitely the weakest to make it to the final round. Not having been to any of the initial rounds, much less Thursday (the night Wolf came out on top), I'm not sure what to make of that.

It actually leaves me wondering if more established artists like Cabeen and Reeber were able to draw a different audience from the line-up on the first night. Wolf's piece was all right, but it was just too audience-pleasing, and too easy, I think--more like a musical theatre number based on Edward Gorey than contemporary dance. I like Gorey and I like musicals fine, but if The A.W.A.R.D. Show is intended to connect audiences to contemporary dance, in this case it failed. I don't want to trash Wolf--this is, I think, the only piece of hers I've seen--but musicals remain a fairly popular form of entertainment. The textual element and scripted parts make the work very accessible, and given the ambivalence expressed by so many people about how The A.W.A.R.D. Show could wind up playing to a sort of lowest common denominator in terms of allowing the audience to reward or, in a sense, punish choreographers, Wolf's win against people like Olivier Wevers seemed to confirm that.

But that's just my thought, and apparently I might just be being elitist and high-art about it, if Neta Pulvermacher has anything to say about it. (And I do love boilerplate responses posted all over the web.)

Amy Mikel, dance writer for Seattlest.com.

Amy Right, Wolf's piece has its merits, but I would have liked something a bit stronger in there for the final round, and I wonder if Sunday's audience generally felt that way as well. In the case of the Thursday evening bracket, I've previously seen both the Whim W’Him and the Coriolis Dance Collective submissions, and I think either one of those surpasses Deborah Wolf's in terms of expanding the artistic boundaries of dance. Excluding Ricki Mason's piece--which I unfortunately haven't seen--in the case of the Thursday night show, I would have probably voted for Whim W’Him (which was Seth's opinion as well). It looks like Whim W’Him will be back at On the Boards in a few weeks, and I plan on being there to see what Wevers and co. has got going on.

That all being said, ultimately Wolf's piece deserved to be a contender. It was chosen by The A.W.A.R.D. Show panel to be in the competition and the audience voted it into the final round. So that is that.

Overall my main issue was with The A.W.A.R.D. Show format. I have no problem with the idea of a dance competition, Neta Pulvermacher! The show certainly did get people talking and put asses in the seats, and its competitive aspect and the $10,000 prize were obviously the main catalysts for that. In the future I would like to see twice as many contenders and be given the opportunity to rate them each individually against the group as a whole. Sunday's show in particular was a disappointment. We saw another packed house turn up to sit though a 45-minute show, then be shooed out into the lobby to mill around while the votes were counted. It didn't feel like the climax of a serious, intensive dance competition. Personally, if I was curious about dance and was brought to the Sunday show by all The A.W.A.R.D. Show press I would have been turned off to the scene; I would have felt like "this is it?" I don't think an accurate segment of the best dancers and choreographers in this town was represented.

Jeremy Well, yes it put asses in seats, but if the mission is to be populist and expand the contemporary dance audience, as Pulvermacher attests, I do still wonder if that's the case. In her open letter explaining The A.W.A.R.D. Show that got posted everywhere, Pulvermacher wrote, "I was and am sick and tired of seeing friends and neighbors (only) at modern dance shows..." The funny thing is, responding to that on the On the Boards blog, Catherine Cabeen wrote, "As a participant I can attest that many more people bought tickets to the show when I said, 'I’m competing for 10K' than have when I have told them, 'I am presenting my work.' I’m sad that this is true, but fascinated by it at the same time."

Now, given all the concerns about audience-packing for the vote, I just want to make clear that's not what I'm suggesting Cabeen did--and why would she need to, frankly? everyone loves her work--and I also want to point out that the organizers took precautions to prevent that from happening. My point is, Cabeen's comment sort of flies in the face of the stated purpose to draw in new audiences. Does this competitive format engage existing audiences differently? Sure. Did new audiences actually show up? I'm not so sure.

And the truth is, I'm actually okay with that. I've heard so many artists and producers complain about small audiences over the years that I've started feeling bad for the audiences that do show up. It's not that I don't believe in outreach, cultivating new audiences, and trying to get your work in front of as many people as possible. It's just that I don't think that audience size--or the degree to which they're engaged with or enjoy the work--should be the ultimate marker of success. And that's why I'm not willing to write off the choreographers' ambivalence to putting their (or their peers') work up to a popular vote to determine who gets some serious funding for new projects.

Personally, I think the fact that Reeber won--an unabashedly postmodern artist who told me going in that, "I'm not responsible for, or even going to waste time making assumptions about, how people will respond" to her work--is the best sign that the format can actually work, and that you don't have to play to the lowest common denominator to win over an audience.

Amy It's great that the event was so well attended, even maybe for the most banal of reasons, but is contemporary dance really, as Pulvermacher puts it, "an impoverished field?" I think schmaltzy shows like Dancing with the Stars and the more stately So You Think You Can Dance have achieved volumes in getting people interested in dance. According to Cleveland.com, business at Arthur Murray International (they have a franchise in Seattle) has increased 240 percent since Dancing with the Stars premiered. I think the misconception is that the general populace is shuffling around, waiting to be "ushered" down the path of discovering contemporary dance. I give people more credit than that; there are thousands of things to be interested in and dance is just one of them. Frankly, there's a surfeit of all kinds of artists out there who feel they have something to contribute and there will never be enough recognition (deserved or not) to go around.

I feel the focal point needs to be less about the educating the audience and more about empowering the artists: an "if you build it, they will come" sort of philosophy.

So going back to The A.W.A.R.D. Show format, what benefits ultimately were passed down to the artists? They got additional exposure, sure, and Amelia walked away with a cool $10K. Maybe several newbies to the scene, freshly intrigued, will buy tickets to shows in the future, although like I said before, I'm not really sure how this event was a singular illumination of contemporary dance in Seattle--it wasn't. All of the submissions were existing pieces of work--in fact, that was a requirement--and I can think of several examples where they have already cropped up together in previous programs. All the artists are very aware of each other and what they are doing, so additionally how does it serve them to know "the audience" would rank things as 1, 2, 3? Amelia said very bluntly she is not going to "waste time" making that her focus. For all of Pulvermacher's lofty language about wanting to "create a vital, dynamic, direct, space where questions could and should be asked of life, of values, of art, of community, of how to make a presenting structure that would inspire a vibrant community to form," I just don't see the way The A.W.A.R.D. Show accomplished that.

Jeremy I totally agree. The A.W.A.R.D. Show is just one more means to promote dance, although the money and publicity behind it tend to make it look more definitive than it is.