Yes Manifesto

This is partially based on Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 “No Manifesto” which rejected traditions of theatricality to redefine dance. While I appreciate the value of rejecting the normative/cliche in the process of finding new possibilities, I think this “Yes Manifesto” better represents a current generation of artists who define innovation through what they include rather than what they exclude:

Yes to spectacle.
Yes to plainness.
Yes to virtuosity.
Yes to full-out and fabulous.
Yes to pedestrian.
Yes to moving.
Yes to stillness.
Yes to breaking though physical limitations.
Yes to accepting physical limitations.
Yes to exploring and celebrating limitations.
Yes to magic.
Yes to realism.
Yes to narrative.
Yes to abstract.
Yes to movement for movement’s sake.
Yes to music.
Yes to Beethoven.
Yes to Beyonce.
Yes to banging and screaming.
Yes to silence.
Yes to style.
Yes to simplicity.
Yes to complex.
Yes to complicated.
Yes to star-power.
Yes to anonymity.
Yes to powerlessness.
Yes to stage faces.
Yes to actual faces.
Yes to deadpan.
Yes to being moved.
Yes to feeling.
Yes to cold intellectualism.
Yes to hot intellectualism.
Yes to eye candy.
Yes to eye vegetables.
Yes to high art.
Yes to low art.
Yes to medium art.
Yes to dancing on the proscenium stage.
Yes to dancing in the streets.
Yes to dancing on screens.
Yes to dancing in clubs.
Yes to dancing in your bedroom.
Yes to out-of-the-box.
Yes to inside-the-box.
Yes to jumping off the box.
Yes to crushing the box.
Yes to wearing the box on your head.
Yes to beauty.
Yes to ugly.
Yes to almost-beautiful and almost-ugly, and everything in-between and outside.
Yes, and . . . 
Or at least maybe . . .