It’s a tempting idea: we just claim that dance was owned by its audience. And since they can’t take it home from theatre, they can keep it in form of a documentation. Just like a poster might seem a weak replacement of a painting, but a replacement nevertheless. The audience can get the video or DVD in exchange for a small fee. Naturally.

Now if we were to put this idea into practise, there would be a revolt by those choreographers who deem their work un-filmable. And by the music industry. Both starving composers and well-paid orchestras press their ears to the thick walls of collecting societies, scanning the videos closely for those sounds which promise large payouts of due royalties. Dancers and choreographers, however, stay altogether silent at the “royal dinner table”. Since where would they even turn to to register their rights? Never mind, nobody fancies dance without music.

And yet, there would be plenty of opportunity: there are, after all, creators of dance who would jump in joyous pirouettes if their work was available on video. Not just as a self-made documentation on amateur camera, but as a proper video, which might interest a larger audience and various event managers.

Utopia? Not at all. After all, the nation’s largest archive of visual dance is with the national television under public law, isn’t it? And that has nothing to fear from a comparison with the graveyard Père-Lachaise. The national TV stores high-quality documentaries of the most important German choreographers. A complete “Who is Who of Dance” has been accumulated over the years. Yet, like in Paris, what remains to be managed are dusty relics – administered to death, accurately archived. Artworks of the highest quality patiently awaiting a prince to kiss them free.

In these times of decreasing fees, however, television is unwilling to peddle their goods of dance films to anyone but other TV stations. It’s hardly possible to get a minute of dance for under 1000 Euros. And why should Television give away its treasures? Back luck, if you lost the remote control of your VCR – or maybe you hadn’t even been born yet, when the production was broadcast?

If you ask the audience with a theatre subscription, who happen to watch dance once a year, if they’d like to take dance home with them, they’ll reply that they’d rather go to the library, where they can find thousands of well-sorted music CDs, which they can enjoy during car rides or cooking. Or they prefer the local “artotheque”, which provides them with ever changing paintings for their living rooms.

Their son, who only watches MTV but lacks some of the videos teaching him the latest Hip Hop moves, is considered pubertal. Their daughter, who studies painting and is just doing research about Bakst, Benois and their connection to dance, should rather start doing something proper with her life and earn some real money. And Grandma, who’s interested in the senior dance afternoons, should really go and see a doctor if her knee is piping up again.

Is it really necessary to travel to the end of the nation to be able to watch a favourite, or a missed, dance performance at some archive? Which will probably have a sign on the door saying: “Sorry, but due to current recordings of premières and technical reconstructions of amateur videos we have to limit our services to the public.”
Never mind. Those standing in front of the closed doors, I will refer to Graz, where the dance company Rubato is running their dance shop. Here, they’ll be able to learn dance steps for a fee and they can take a video of their own performance home with them.
This shop offers on a small scale what otherwise is only available on big scale: Dance for everyone. The original. In the theatre.