Dance is truly the cruelest of the fine arts. Visit a museum and a painting you love, an installation, a sculpture might no longer be on display, but it still exists, out there in the world somewhere, and also online, or in your camera. You can look at it again, and get a taste, a touch, a contact high of what it did to you that first time.
Opera, theater, the symphony—none of them last forever, but some are recorded for posterity, and others exist in other forms. It’s amazing how a show can come back to life even years later simply by reading the script or listening to the cast recording.
Dance is not like that. It happens for a select number of performances in a certain number of venues and is then in all but the rarest cases—Swan Lake, The Nutcracker—no more. And while listening to the music around which a show is built can conjure back up moments or images, they are thin and fleeting, phantoms that vanish as soon as you set to look upon them squarely.
I discovered this for the first …
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