There is a particular kind of discomfort that arrives in the first ten minutes of a performance when you realize the choreographer has not made a single concession to your pleasure. The lights may be too bright or too dim. The sound may be a low hum that never resolves. The dancers may be moving with a slowness that feels almost punitive. This is not a failure of craft. It is a philosophical position. The work is not asking for your approval. It is asking for your attention, and it is willing to risk your irritation to get it. This article is about why that risk matters, and why you should watch dance made by people who do not care if you enjoy it.
In the landscape of 20th and 21st-century concert dance, the question of audience enjoyment has always been a fault line. On one side, there is the tradition of the well-made dance: clear phrasing, legible emotion, a satisfying arc. On the other side, there is a lineage that runs from the early modernist provocations of the Ballets Russes through the Judson Dance Theater’s pedestrian experiments, the durational works of artists like Deborah Hay and Maria Hassabi, and the contemporary performance art scene where choreographic decisions function as arguments about time, labor, and spectatorship. This second lineage is the subject here. It is not a niche. It is a coherent tradition with its own methods, its own history, and its own demands on the body of the viewer.
I write this as someone who has sat through performances that made me angry, bored, restless, and occasionally euphoric. I have felt my own somatic state shift in response to a lighting cue or a repeated gesture. I have left theaters convinced that a work was hostile to its audience, only to find myself thinking about it days later. That residue is data. It is evidence that the work did something to me, even if it did not do what I wanted. This article is an attempt to take that evidence seriously.
The Choreographic Argument Against Enjoyment
When a choreographer refuses to prioritize enjoyment, they are making a claim about what dance is for. The claim is not that pleasure is worthless. It is that pleasure is not the only, or even the primary, mode of engagement. A work by Yvonne Rainer, for example, does not ask you to feel good. It asks you to notice the mechanics of movement, the weight of a body, the duration of a task. Rainer’s 1965 Trio A is a landmark here: a continuous, uninflected phrase that refuses climax, refuses musicality, refuses the conventions of dance phrasing that signal emotional peaks. The work is not difficult for the sake of difficulty. It is difficult because it is trying to show you something about movement that the pleasure-oriented tradition hides.
This is a philosophical argument in the most literal sense. The choreographer is saying: the conditions under which you watch are part of the work. The lighting, the seating, the temperature of the room, the length of the piece, the absence of a program note—these are not neutral containers. They are evidence. When Maria Hassabi stages a work like PLASTIC (2015), in which dancers move so slowly that their motion is almost imperceptible, the audience is forced to confront its own impatience. The work does not care if you are bored. It cares that you notice your boredom, and that you ask what your boredom is made of.
The Material Conditions of Spectatorship
One of the most useful ways to approach this kind of work is to treat the material conditions of spectatorship as evidence. This means paying attention to things that are usually invisible: the hardness of the seat, the angle of the light, the sound of the HVAC system, the presence or absence of a curtain, the way the program is written. These are not accidents. In the work of choreographers like Tere O’Connor or Meg Stuart, the performance space is often arranged to make the audience aware of its own physicality. You are not a disembodied eye. You are a body in a room, and the room is part of the argument.
I remember a performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2019, a durational work by a choreographer whose name I will not mention because the point is not the name but the structure. The audience was seated on hard wooden benches. The piece lasted three hours. There was no intermission. The dancers repeated a single phrase for the first forty minutes. At some point, I became aware of the pressure of the bench against my sit bones. That sensation was not a distraction from the work. It was the work. The choreographer had made a decision about seating, and that decision was doing something to my body. The discomfort was not a bug. It was a feature.
Boredom as a Choreographic Tool
Boredom is one of the most misunderstood tools in the choreographic toolkit. In a culture that treats attention as a commodity and distraction as a default, the deliberate production of boredom is a radical act. When a work is boring, it is often because the choreographer is refusing to provide the usual rewards: narrative resolution, emotional catharsis, virtuosic display. Instead, the work asks you to sit with the absence of those rewards and to notice what happens in that absence.
This is not the same as incompetence. There is a difference between a work that is boring because it has nothing to say and a work that is boring because it is using boredom as a material. The first kind of boredom is flat and empty. The second kind is textured and productive. It creates a space in which your own attention becomes visible to you. You notice the rhythm of your breathing, the flicker of your thoughts, the urge to check your phone. That noticing is a form of somatic data. It is information about how you are built, how you are conditioned, how you respond to time.
The Somatic State of the Critic as Data
As a critic, I have learned to treat my own somatic state as evidence. This is not a license for self-indulgence. It is a methodological commitment. When I watch a performance, I am not a camera. I am a body with a history, a nervous system, a set of habits and injuries. My boredom, my irritation, my physical restlessness—these are not obstacles to understanding. They are data points. They tell me something about the work’s relationship to its audience, and about my own relationship to the work.
This approach has a long history in somatic performance criticism. It draws on the work of critics like Jill Johnston, who wrote about dance from the inside of her own experience, and on the broader field of phenomenology, which insists that perception is always embodied. When I write about a performance, I try to include the texture of my own watching: the ache in my lower back, the dryness of my eyes, the moment when my attention snapped back into focus. These details are not decorative. They are evidence of the work’s effects.
What the Body Notices Before the Mind Does
One of the most reliable signs that a work is doing something interesting is that my body notices it before my mind does. I have felt my jaw tighten during a performance before I could articulate why. I have felt my breathing change in response to a shift in the lighting. I have felt the urge to leave, not because the work was bad, but because it was pressing on something I did not want to feel. These somatic responses are often more honest than my intellectual judgments. They are the body’s way of saying: something is happening here.
This is why I recommend watching difficult dance with a kind of double attention. Pay attention to the work, but also pay attention to yourself watching the work. Notice where your attention goes. Notice what you resist. Notice the moment when you want to give up. That moment is not a failure. It is a threshold. The work is asking you to cross it, or at least to stand at its edge and look.
The Lineage of the Difficult
The tradition of dance that does not care if you enjoy it is not a recent invention. It has a history, and that history is worth knowing. It begins, in the modern era, with the early 20th-century experiments of artists like Mary Wigman and Valeska Gert, who stripped dance of its decorative functions and used it to explore states of anxiety, grotesquerie, and social critique. It continues through the postwar avant-garde, when Merce Cunningham separated dance from music and narrative, and when the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s rejected virtuosity in favor of ordinary movement. It extends into the present, where artists like Trajal Harrell, Ligia Lewis, and Mette Ingvartsen use choreography to interrogate race, gender, labor, and the politics of the body.
This lineage is not unified by a single style. It is unified by a shared refusal: the refusal to treat the audience’s comfort as the primary goal. That refusal is not hostility. It is a form of respect. It assumes that the audience is capable of more than passive consumption. It assumes that you can think, feel, and endure. It assumes that you are an adult.
Judson and the Ordinary
The Judson Dance Theater, active in New York from 1962 to 1964, is often cited as the moment when dance broke with its own conventions. The artists associated with Judson—Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and others—made works that used walking, running, sitting, and other ordinary actions. They performed in lofts and churches, not proscenium theaters. They rejected the idea that dance required trained bodies, musical accompaniment, or emotional expression. The result was a body of work that many audiences found baffling, boring, or even insulting. But that bafflement was part of the point. The work was asking: what counts as dance? What counts as a body? What counts as a performance?
Rainer’s famous 1965 manifesto, the “No Manifesto,” is a concise statement of this position. It begins: “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe.” It is a list of refusals, and each refusal is a philosophical claim. The work that emerged from these refusals was not designed to be enjoyed. It was designed to be thought about, felt, and argued with.
The Durational Turn
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many choreographers turned to duration as a primary material. Works by artists like Deborah Hay, whose The Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom (1989) unfolds over hours, or Maria Hassabi, whose slow-motion installations blur the line between dance and visual art, use time itself as a choreographic force. These works do not offer the satisfactions of narrative or climax. They offer the experience of time passing, of bodies persisting, of attention stretching and fraying. The audience is not asked to enjoy this. The audience is asked to endure it, and in enduring, to notice what endurance feels like.
This is not a masochistic exercise. It is a way of making visible the structures of time and labor that are usually hidden. When you watch a dancer hold a position for twenty minutes, you are not just watching a body. You are watching work. You are watching effort. You are watching the cost of persistence. That cost is not abstract. It is written in the trembling of a muscle, the sweat on a forehead, the slow sag of a shoulder. The work does not care if you enjoy it. It cares that you see it.
How to Watch Work That Does Not Want Your Pleasure
If you are new to this kind of dance, the experience can be disorienting. You may feel that you are doing something wrong, that you are missing the point, that the work is simply bad. Here are some practical ways to approach it.
1. Lower Your Expectations for Resolution
Most of us are trained to expect a story, a climax, a takeaway. Difficult dance often refuses all three. Instead of asking “What does it mean?” try asking “What is it doing?” and “What am I doing while I watch it?” The meaning may not arrive as a sentence. It may arrive as a sensation, a question, a residue that lingers after the performance ends.
2. Notice the Room
Before the performance begins, look at the space. Where are you sitting? How is the light arranged? What sounds are present? These are not neutral details. They are part of the work. The choreographer has made decisions about them, and those decisions are doing something to you. Notice them.
3. Track Your Own Body
As you watch, pay attention to your own physical state. Where is the tension in your body? What is your breathing doing? When do you want to look away? These responses are data. They are not distractions from the work. They are the work’s effects on you, and they are worth taking seriously.
4. Stay a Little Longer Than You Want To
If you feel the urge to leave, try staying for five more minutes. Not because the work will suddenly become enjoyable, but because the urge to leave is itself information. What is it about this moment that you cannot tolerate? What would happen if you stayed with it? The answer may be more interesting than the work.
The Ethics of the Difficult
There is an ethical dimension to this kind of dance. It is not just an aesthetic preference. It is a claim about the relationship between artist and audience. The choreographer who does not care if you enjoy it is not saying that you do not matter. They are saying that your enjoyment is not the only thing that matters. They are saying that you are capable of more than enjoyment, and that the work is willing to ask more of you.
This is a form of respect, but it is also a form of risk. The risk is that the audience will leave, or that the work will be dismissed as pretentious or self-indulgent. That risk is real. But the alternative—making work that only confirms what the audience already knows and feels—is a kind of stagnation. It is the choreographic equivalent of comfort food. It may be pleasant, but it does not change anything.
The difficult work, the work that does not care if you enjoy it, is a wager. It wagers that you are willing to be uncomfortable, to be bored, to be challenged. It wagers that you are willing to think. That wager is not always won. But when it is, the result is not just a performance. It is a transformation of the conditions under which you watch, and perhaps of the conditions under which you live.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is dance that does not care if I enjoy it just bad dance?
Not necessarily. There is a difference between a work that is difficult because it is making a deliberate choreographic argument and a work that is difficult because it is poorly made. The distinction is not always easy to draw, but one useful test is whether the work’s difficulty feels intentional and consistent. If the lighting, the pacing, the movement quality, and the structure all seem to be working toward the same uncomfortable effect, the difficulty is likely deliberate. If the difficulty feels random or accidental, it may simply be bad craft.
What if I am bored? Is that a valid response?
Yes, and it is also useful data. Boredom is a signal that the work is not providing the usual rewards. The question is what you do with that signal. You can dismiss the work, or you can investigate the boredom. What is it made of? What would need to happen for the boredom to lift? What is the work doing instead of entertaining you? These questions can turn boredom from a dead end into a doorway.
Do I need special training to watch this kind of dance?
No. You need patience and a willingness to pay attention to your own responses. Some familiarity with the history of experimental dance can help, but it is not required. The work is often designed to be encountered directly, without mediation. Your body already knows how to respond to time, light, sound, and movement. The task is to trust that knowledge and to take it seriously.
Why should I spend my time on work that is not enjoyable?
Because enjoyment is not the only value. Difficult dance can change the way you see, the way you feel, the way you understand your own attention. It can make you aware of the conditions under which you watch and live. It can give you an experience that stays with you long after the performance ends. That is not a small thing. It is a form of knowledge, and it is worth the discomfort.
This article is part of a continuing series on the philosophy of spectatorship. A follow-up piece will examine the role of lighting design in choreographic argument, with close readings of works by Tere O’Connor and Ligia Lewis.