The Dance of Engagement
The July-August 2006 issue of Minnesota, the magazine of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association, has an article entitled "Political Movement", about the life and work of UM faculty member and dancer Carl Flink. It's a powerful portrait, and the article, by Camille LeFevre, is worth a full reading. Here I'd just like to quote a few paragraphs that speak cogently of the special role that dance—and by implication the work of university artists in general—can play in public life.
'Black Label Movement [Flink's dance company] is the means by which Flink merges his theories and research in dance with real-world practice. "It's a holistic model that has the specific benefit of breaking down institutional walls between the university and the larger Twin Cities community," Flink explains. "And it gives people who aren't necessarily going to respond to an article, a book, a lecture, or a panel a whole new way of accessing those ideas."According to Steve Rosenstone, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Black Label Movement demonstrates that faculty contributions to the broader community are "not just about technology transfer, not just about jobs, not just about serving as consultants to cities when they're designing highways and buildings," he says. Rather, artistic ventures like Black Label Movement contribute to "the cultural fabric of our community."
The company also brings a powerful and unique choreographic voice to the local dance community. "A lot of people in academia and beyond think of the arts as simply descriptive of knowledge," Flink says. "Someone does a piece about apartheid so the audience will think and learn something deeper about it." Instead of making his dances "about" something, Flink says, in his work "artistic expression comes out of the body through movement." This "embodied art," as he calls his work, conveys "a way of knowing, not a description. It's a way of communicating in and of itself. I don't need to layer it with a paragraph of description."'