Groundbreaking art continually challenges its own self-definition. This is the same for dance and music. Consider, the DVD video Stomp Out Loud, presented by the dance ensemble “Stomp!”, which overturns some of our preconceptions of what dance means. What is immediately compelling about the piece is that it goes outside of the standard norms of where dance, in its artistic form, is performed: the dancers are gathered in an urban setting, on top of an apartment complex. Furthermore, they are suspended, through various safety mechanisms that are most reminiscent of a construction site, to a collection of materials serving as percussion instruments, whereby the performers proceed to move rhythmically to the sounds they produce by striking these same instruments.
Merce Cunningham’s “Points in Space” alongside John Cage’s “Voiceless Essay” accomplishes the same provocation: if Stomp asks the question “what is dance?”, Cage asks the question “what is music?” The manipulation of sound becomes for Cage a challenging of what music itself means: recognizable sounds become altered so as to produce unrecognizable sounds within the context of music, that is, within the familiarity of composition. The distribution of “points in space” is an ode to a new aesthetic that subverts standard norms in radical new manners.
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"Is This Dance?".
Cirque de Soleil’s “Nouvelle Experience” is apt in its title, along much the same lines as the aforementioned pieces: it is a “new experience” of the possibilities of art, of a “total art” that incorporates all aesthetic elements, in the dream of Wagner, although in a strikingly modern form. The synthesis of humor and wonder, for example, immerses the viewer in the environment of a transformed art, where the traditional “low brow” circus becomes the articulation of the highest of aesthetic achievements of such “total art.”
