ARTS WEEKLY/DANCE-CHILE: State Funding Needed to Revive a Dying Art Form

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

María Cecilia Espinosa

SANTIAGO, Sep 21 2005 (IPS) - Without government funding, the creative power of dance in Chile will continue to wane, warns choreographer Karen Connolly, who has witnessed a steady exodus of young talent spurred by the lack of prospects at home.

The recent popularity of amateur dance competitions on television and the growing number of dance schools or academies would seem to reflect an upsurge in interest in dance among Chileans, as both spectators and participants.

But despite the boom in “popular” dance schools, many of them run by dancers who have earned fame on TV, there is a serious surfeit of funding and infrastructure for classical dance, stress professionals and academics from this sector.

Chile has only three government-funded dance companies, which have their own permanent facilities, and in which dancers are paid not only for performances, but also receive a regular salary covering the periods when they practice and rehearse.

These are the Chilean National Ballet, founded in 1945, the Santiago Ballet, founded in 1959, and the Ballet Folklórico Nacional, a folk dance troupe founded in 1965.

Outside these three companies, “independent dancers have to move the furniture out of the way to practice at home, which I find unjust for people in such a challenging profession,” said Connolly, who represents the dance sector in the Chilean government’s Culture and Arts Council.

In an interview with IPS, Connolly maintained that “99.9 percent of the creativity is found in the independent companies”, which are forced to be self-financing.

The reality faced by these companies is a far cry from that of the Santiago Ballet, based in the Chilean capital’s Municipal Theatre. “They receive 1.5 billion pesos (roughly three million dollars) in government funding annually, when the works they perform, the choreographers, the director and 85 percent of the dancers are foreign,” she remarked.

While there are other established, stable dance companies in Chile, primarily connected to academic institutions, experts warn that there is not enough support for this discipline in the form of long-term funding, education, or literature to record its history and manifestations.

Connolly, along with theatre director and actor Héctor Noguera and Vicente Ruiz, a dancer and the current director of the school of dance at the Universidad Mayor, a private university, stressed at a recent conference that the Chilean government needs to designate a theatre as an exclusive venue for dance, and that state funding is the only way to ensure that independent companies can maintain a permanent corps of dancers.

For Noguera, the Chilean state has ignored its responsibility, which makes this an “ethical problem. By failing to support creativity, it is allowing lives and souls to be wasted. This is not just a matter of money, but rather of society,” he said.

Magali Rivano, a dancer and choreographer, as well as one of the judges for the amateur dance competition that has become one of the most popular programmes on Chilean public TV, told IPS that “the fact that dance has captured the public eye, even if it is because of a contest, has been very important, because it has helped do away with the stigma of dance being only for girls.”

“People have seen that dance is a potential means of personal development, and that a talented child can be guided towards becoming an excellent professional dancer,” she added.

Rivano underlined that the lack of resources “is not an empty complaint, it is a reality”. Dance is “a long and difficult career path, and not many people follow it, because they know that it is also not very lucrative”.

With more government support, “we could have greater representation and possibilities for self development”, she said.

Ruiz pointed out that according to statistics from the Culture and Arts Council, only three percent of the population attends at least one dance performance a year.

Rivano attributes this lack of public interest to the absence of dance in the educational system, unlike other countries where it forms part of the school curriculum.

Elsewhere, she noted, “you find amazing groups in the secondary schools, dancers who are practically professionals when they are kids just graduating from high school.”

Moreover, “Chile is a sedentary country, where people dance very little, and even their body language and gestures are limited. We have to do something to change this lack of physicality,” she said, especially considering that 17 percent of pupils enrolled in the first year of primary education, or roughly 36,000 children, are overweight.

Rivano believes that dance entails “not only physical development, but also the development of physicality from within, through greater sensitivity and emotional awareness.”

Jennifer McColl, a fifth-year dance student at the private Arcis University and a teaching assistant in a history of dance course, distinguished between the dance performances featured on television and the artistic dance taught at the university level.

There are three higher education institutions that offer dance programmes: the University of Chile, which stresses classical dance; the private Academy of Christian Humanism University, which follows a more expressionist or modern line; and Arcis, where the emphasis is on contemporary dance, McColl told IPS.

In the meantime, the academies founded by TV dancers are more geared towards dance as a form of entertainment, as opposed to an art form.

McColl maintained that “when it comes to choreographic creativity, not only dance but also the artistic sphere in general are significantly limited by national cultural policies, such as the projects financed by the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONDART).”

The small number of specialists in contemporary dance leads to a poor yield in terms of creativity. “With only six or seven notable choreographers producing new works every year, which all derive from the same references, there is little room for newcomers,” she noted.

While state funding has allowed the contemporary dance sector to survive and continue developing, the problem is that “everything is cut from the same cloth, because those who evaluate FONDART projects are the same ones who submit projects the following year,” she said.

McColl concurs with Rivano about the reasons for the lack of public interest in dance as an art form. “There is very little done to promote public awareness and education regarding dance as an artistic expression, while dance as a form of entertainment is far more popular.”

Despite these ongoing problems, there is cause for optimism. Chile is experiencing an upsurge in dance competitions, festivals, workshops and classes ranging from ballet to flamenco to folk dance. And the educational authorities are even considering making the “cueca”, the Chilean national dance, a required component of physical education classes.

Karen Connolly hopes that in the future, talent can be developed “wherever it appears, even if it is in a poor family that cannot afford the training”. This could give rise to the emergence of a new generation that could breathe new life into dance in Chile, thus resuscitating the creative power that gradually dwindled over the 20th century.