There is a moment, a handful of seconds really, that I return to again and again. It comes from a piece I saw in a small black-box theater in Berlin seven years ago. The dancer, a woman whose name I never caught, was standing in a diagonal shaft of light. For what felt like an eternity, she did nothing but shift her weight from the ball of one foot to the heel of the other. The movement was so minute you could miss it if you blinked. But if you stayed with it, you began to notice the cascade of adjustments it demanded: a slight torque in the hip, a subtle recalibration of the spine, the tendons in her ankle flickering like plucked strings. The room was silent except for the sound of her breathing and the occasional creak of the floor. Someone behind me sighed with impatience. Someone else got up and left. And I sat there, my own pulse syncing to that tiny, relentless rocking, feeling as if I were witnessing a language I was only beginning to learn.
That dance was not accessible. It did not explain itself. It offered no narrative handholds, no easy emotional cues, no virtuosic leaps to applaud. It asked me to meet it on its own terms, and in doing so, it trusted me. That trust is what I want to talk about here—because we are losing it. We are drowning in a culture that insists art, and dance in particular, must be for everyone, must be instantly legible, must validate its existence through broad appeal. I think this is a quiet catastrophe.
The Tyranny of the Welcome Mat
Let me be clear: I am not arguing against education, community programs, or sliding-scale tickets. Those are structural necessities. What concerns me is the ideological drift that has turned “accessibility” from a tool of inclusion into a yardstick for artistic merit. The unspoken assumption is that if a piece of dance doesn’t communicate immediately, it has failed. That the audience’s comfort is the choreographer’s responsibility. That opacity is a kind of rudeness.
This assumption flattens the very thing that makes dance matter. Dance is not a product that needs to optimize its user experience. It is a mode of thinking through the body. And thought, real thought, is often difficult. It requires friction, disorientation, duration. The most generative experiences I’ve had as a viewer came when I was slightly lost, when the movement refused to resolve into tidy meaning, when my habitual ways of seeing were gently dismantled. That dismantling is a gift. It’s not exclusion—it’s an invitation to complexity.
Yet we’re increasingly expected to apologize for complexity. I’ve heard choreographers, in post-show talks, almost sheepishly explain that a work “might not be for everyone.” As if that were a flaw. As if a dance’s value were measurable by the size of its audience or the speed of its emotional payoff. This is the logic of the marketplace colonizing the logic of art. And it’s particularly harmful to dance, an art form that has historically thrived in margins, in queer spaces, in underground clubs, in studios where bodies research questions that have no immediate social utility.
Legibility Is Not the Same as Meaning
There’s a specific kind of boredom that I’ve learned to trust. It’s not the boredom of disengagement, but the boredom of an unfamiliar syntax. When I first watched the work of Eiko and Koma, I felt it. Their butoh-influenced movement, as slow as geological time, made my mind itch. I wanted them to hurry up, to give me something recognizable. But somewhere in the second hour, my impatience dissolved. The slowness was not a lack of content; it was the content. It was teaching me a different temporality, a different relationship to gravity and decay. I had to unlearn my own rhythm to enter theirs.
This unlearning sits at the heart of aesthetic experience, and it’s exactly what the accessibility mandate erases. It demands that art speak our language, instead of asking us to learn its language. But dance, at its most alive, is a language that does not yet exist. It’s forged in the moment, in the specific body of a specific performer, in the specific architecture of a space. To reduce it to something instantly parsable is to sever its connection to the unknown.
I think here of choreographer Maria Hassabi. Her pieces often involve performers moving so slowly that the motion is almost imperceptible. Audiences frequently walk out. Others stay, and something shifts in them. I’ve seen people weep, not because the work told them a sad story, but because the sheer discipline of the performers’ presence became overwhelming. That presence isn’t “inaccessible”—it’s demanding. It requires a different kind of attention, a willingness to sit with uncertainty. The value of such work lies precisely in its refusal to meet us halfway. It asks us to travel the full distance ourselves.
To demand that dance be accessible is, in effect, to demand that it be familiar. And familiarity breeds a different kind of exclusion—the exclusion of the strange, the difficult, the new. It protects the audience from the vulnerability of not knowing, but it also protects them from the possibility of transformation.
The Body’s Right to Opacity
Dance is made of bodies. And bodies are not transparent. They carry histories, traumas, desires, idiosyncrasies that refuse simple translation. A lifted shoulder blade, a splayed hand, a sudden collapse into the knees—these gestures are dense with meaning that can’t be fully articulated. They are what the poet Édouard Glissant called “the right to opacity.” Glissant argued that transparency, the demand that everything be made understandable to the dominant culture, is a form of violence. Opacity, on the other hand, is a protection of difference. It’s the right not to be fully known.
When we insist that dance be accessible, we are often insisting on a kind of transparency. We want the body to explain itself, to translate its strangeness into a familiar idiom. But the body’s opacity is not a bug; it’s its deepest resource. The tremor in a dancer’s leg, the way breath catches in a ribcage, the angle of a head that resists interpretation—these are the textures that make dance irreplaceable. They cannot be paraphrased into language or reduced to a message. They are the thing itself.
I remember a solo by the Japanese dancer Akira Kasai. He was in his seventies at the time, and his body was a map of its own history. He moved with a fractured, almost cubist logic, his limbs seeming to operate independently of each other. At one point, he stood with his back to the audience and simply vibrated. The vibration was so fine, so internal, that it looked like heat haze. I have no idea what it “meant.” I don’t want to know. The opacity of that moment was its power. It refused to be consumed. It left a residue that I am still processing years later.
If we lose the right to opacity, we lose the capacity for such residues. We are left with dance that is easily digested and just as easily forgotten. The work that endures is the work that remains a little alien, that keeps something in reserve.
The Market’s Invisible Hand on the Pelvis
It’s worth asking where this hunger for accessibility comes from. I think it’s inseparable from the economic precarity of the arts. Choreographers are under immense pressure to fill seats, to win grants, to prove their social relevance through audience numbers and diversity metrics. A difficult work is a financial risk. An accessible work is a safer bet. Over time, this calculus shapes not just programming but the very aesthetics of dancemaking. We see a flattening of choreographic language, a retreat into narrative, into spectacle, into anything that can be summarized in a marketing blurb.
This isn’t a new problem, but it has accelerated. Social media, with its relentless demand for shareable content, has intensified the logic. A dance that photographs well, that can be clipped into a 30-second reel, has a survival advantage in the attention economy. A dance that requires an hour of sustained concentration does not. The result is a kind of preemptive self-censorship. Choreographers internalize the demand for accessibility and begin to edit out their own strangeness before it even reaches the stage.
I’ve seen this happen in real time. A choreographer I admire once showed me an early draft of a piece. It was raw, fragmented, full of awkward pauses and sudden shifts in tone. It was thrilling. But when I saw the finished version six months later, it had been sanded smooth. The pauses were filled with movement. The tone was consistent. The audience clapped warmly, and I felt a kind of grief. The work had been made “accessible,” but it had lost its nerve. It had traded its difficult life for a comfortable death.
Accessibility, in this context, becomes a euphemism for marketability. It’s not really about welcoming diverse audiences; it’s about creating a product that moves easily through the channels of cultural consumption. And dance, because it is ephemeral, because it cannot be owned or easily reproduced, is particularly vulnerable to this pressure. We try to compensate by making it legible, but in doing so, we make it less itself.
A Different Kind of Welcome
So what’s the alternative? Not, I hope, a retreat into hermetic elitism. The problem is not that dance is difficult; the problem is that we’ve forgotten how to frame difficulty as a form of hospitality. True hospitality doesn’t mean erasing the strangeness of the guest. It means making space for that strangeness, allowing it to unsettle the home.
This requires a different kind of education, one that doesn’t seek to explain dance into submission but to cultivate what I think of as “kinesthetic patience.” To teach people—from childhood onward—that not understanding is not a failure. That boredom can be a threshold. That the body knows things that the mind does not. This isn’t about providing program notes or pre-show talks, though those can help. It’s about shifting the cultural expectation that art must serve us. Sometimes, we must serve the art.
I’ve seen this ethos in practice. There’s a small theater in Brussels where the audience is invited to arrive half an hour early. No one speaks. You simply sit in the space and let your nervous system settle. When the performance begins, you’re already attuned to the room’s acoustics, its temperature, the way light falls on the floor. The dance that follows isn’t necessarily “accessible,” but the conditions for attention have been prepared. It’s a minimal gesture, but it reframes the relationship. The audience isn’t a consumer; it’s a participant in an act of attention.
Valuing the Unvaluable
Ultimately, the problem with thinking that dance needs to be accessible to be valuable is that it reduces value to a single metric: comprehension. But the value of dance is often in the incomprehensible. It’s in the moment when your body understands something your mind cannot catch up with. It’s in the afterimage of a gesture that haunts you for days without reason. It’s in the collective silence of an audience breathing together, each person alone with their own confusion and wonder.
I think of that woman in the Berlin theater, rocking on her feet. Her dance was not for everyone. It was not even for most. But for those of us who stayed, it carved a small, permanent groove in our perception. It changed the way I watch people stand in line, shift their weight, wait for a bus. It gave me a tiny revelation about the labor of balance, the quiet heroism of simply staying upright. That revelation wasn’t handed to me. I had to earn it, through patience and through a willingness to be disoriented. And that earning was precisely the point.
Dance does not need to be accessible to be valuable. It needs to be honest. It needs to honor the body’s opacity, its resistance to easy meaning. It needs to trust that an audience can rise to difficulty, and that some of us, at least, are hungry for exactly that—for a work that does not pander, that does not explain, that simply stands in its own light and rocks, asking nothing of us except everything.
Frequently Asked Questions
Doesn’t insisting on difficulty just make dance exclusive?
It can, if difficulty becomes a gatekeeping mechanism rather than an artistic necessity. The goal isn’t to exclude, but to refuse to compromise the integrity of a work for the sake of comfort. True inclusion means making space for a wide spectrum of experiences, including those that challenge, confuse, or unsettle. It means trusting audiences to handle complexity rather than assuming they can’t.
What if a dance work is genuinely alienating, even for experienced viewers?
Alienation can be a productive force. Some works are designed to unsettle, to disrupt the viewer’s sense of safety or expectation. That doesn’t make them failures. The question is whether the alienation serves a purpose—whether it opens a new way of seeing or simply closes off communication. A piece that alienates everyone might still be a necessary experiment, even if it’s difficult to fund or program. Not all art needs to succeed on its own terms immediately.
Is there a role for dance that is intentionally popular and easy to follow?
Absolutely. Popular forms—from TikTok dances to Broadway shows—have their own rigor, their own intelligence, and their own pleasures. The problem arises when that mode becomes the only valued mode, when accessibility becomes an unspoken requirement for funding, press coverage, or institutional support. The dance ecosystem needs both: work that meets people where they are, and work that asks people to move somewhere unfamiliar.
How can I learn to appreciate dance that I don’t immediately understand?
Start by letting go of the need to understand. Pay attention to what your own body is doing as you watch—your breath, your posture, the tension in your shoulders. Notice the textures of movement: speed, weight, rhythm, shape. Let yourself be bored without judgment. Often, the richest experiences come after the point where you want to leave. Talk to others afterward, not to find the “right” interpretation, but to compare the residues the dance left in each of you.