When I think of The Frankfurt School, I imagine stuffy professors with tweed jackets and a pessimistic view of the rest of the world. I shall attempt to critique in the style of my object of study this week, The Frankfurt School, with my chosen cultural industry of the arts – Dance.
When I think of Dance, I think of highly skilled human beings who can make their bodies move in beautiful, miraculous ways. They condition and train their bodies to be strong and precise, and it is a craft which takes years to develop, grow and nurture – and only the elite few make it to a professional level.
Years ago, being a dancer was only a dream for a few people, not your average family could afford to send their sons and daughters to dance school, or pay for weekly tuition, nowadays it’s readily accessible, with an array of new wacky and wonderful genres, and with a different reality dance show popping up on channels almost as fast as you can blink.
To me this once enchanting art form has been standardized without recognition. It isn’t even as individual as it thinks it is, hybrid genres of dance have evolved over the years. For example, dance used to mean performing Swan Lake in front of The Queen, now you can run across the room, move your head to the left and turn on a light switch and it’s classed as ‘contemporary dance’. (No, it really is!)
Dance has been integrated and standardised into our society, and there is no going back, if I wasn’t discussing this in a Frankfurt school perspective, I would say times have changed for the better and that dance should be accessible and enjoyed by everyone, but a part of me agrees that the skill and commitment that once was given to this art, has not gone just yet – but it is certainly beginning to diminish.
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