Realigning Vertical Dance on a Horizontal Continuum

How and by whom does a relatively new art form, such as aerial dance, become validated in the current United States? King Louis XIV birthed a model upon which Western dance has depended upon to answer this question since 1661. Louis XIV essentially established an aesthetic split between the verticality of ballet and the curvilinear quality of acrobatics, causing a hierarchical binary to form in ballet?s favor. This hierarchical aesthetic split between dance and acrobatics currently exists in the US between the genres of aerial dance and aerial circus. I am claiming that leading US aerial dance practitioners are rewarded through the language of art critics, support of funding organizations, and placement within academia for aligning their work with the ballet lineage aesthetics rather than circus acrobatics, which is influencing the artistic evolution of the aerial dance genre.