sarma

Recently, I re-read the preface that I wrote in 1985 for a collection of my reviews and profiles. At that time, I had been writing dance criticism regularly for seventeen years; now, in 2002, I've been contributing to the Village Voice in New York for almost thirty five years. I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I still believe most of the words I wrote back then, and I append the preface below.

However, I am startled to note that the word 'analysis' nowhere appears in that preface. I seem to have allowed 'description' to cover several aspects of criticism. Before I can describe anything on stage, or even choose what to describe, I have to figure out what the given dance is 'about.' What does it reveal about itself? What are the salient structure, spatial designs, and movements being used? Confronting a theatrical work, I have often had to imagine myself an anthropologist, trying to discern the rules and customs that govern behavior in this created 'society' (do all its members, for instance, have to be able to point to twelve o'clock when they raise their legs?).

I also see that I have nowhere mentioned 'context', although dealing with that appropriately is part of the critic's job. Too, the more contemporary dance has moved away from pure explorations of movement and form and into the area of dance theater, the more the critic has to deal with subject matter, background ideas, and related texts.

There's always some new facet of critical writing to consider. That keeps me interested and helps to balance the sad fact that print space for dance is shrinking. Now I have a little under 1200 words for my weekly article in the Village Voice, and the dance editor likes to have me cover at least three performances within that space. The effort to condense affects my style - not, I think, for the better.

From the Preface to The Dance in Mind (1985)

"Don't you ever get sick of going to dance?," people ask. Almost seventeen years of two to five nights a week, over eight hundred articles logged in.... Do I get sick of it? Of course. Well, no.

There are nights when I'd rather go to bed, have friends over, take in a movie. There are mornings when the words won't come, and there are sloughs of depression over the large amounts of mediocre dance I have to comment on. But when the dancing is wonderful or the ideas bright and fresh, or even, sometimes, when the performance is electrifyingly bad, I'd rather be watching dance and writing about it than doing anything else.

Over those seventeen years, I've done a lot of thinking and talking about criticism - how others practice it, the kind that I'm interested in writing. It all hinges on how the writer (and the editor and the public) views his/her role. I don't see myself as an arbiter of taste, a press agent for dance companies, a teacher to artists, or a consumer guide for audiences - even though I'm aware that what I write may be put to those uses. I may, on occasion, assume the historian's role, or the reporter's, but these aren't always appropriate.

So what do I think I'm doing? Some years ago, in Philadelphia, at a conference on Dance and Philosophy, Alan Kriegsman of the Washington Post articulated more lucidly than I ever had a concept of the critic's role that he and I share: he spoke of contributing to the 'hum', surrounding a work. We all acknowledge the ephemerality of dancing - an ephemerality that the advent of video has modified, but not conquered. Critical writing, along with the responses (public and private) to what is written, lobby conversations, interviews, dancers' tales, and so on cling to a dance performance, making it resonate in the memory, prolonging its life. To add to that 'hum' by stimulating thought, and perhaps dissent - that's what continues to interest me.

But my opinion alone isn't much of a contribution. Reading the works of even the best critics of the nineteenth century, and those of many of the twentieth century, I burn for more details. Did the sylphs dance in unison - an impersonal white veil drawn over the stage? Or did they always cluster in groups of three and four - taking on the semblance of spirit-girls at play?

I'd like my words to be a bridge to the work, a window opening on it. (By that I don't mean I wish to stand between the spectators and the work, only that I offer my perspective for people to compare with their own, if they're interested in doing that.) It's this goal that accounts for the amount of space I give to description. You can't report a dance as if it a were a fire, and the essence of a work may utterly vanish in an earnest listing of what body part did what. But there is a kind of descriptive writing that evokes the dance, without pretending to account for every minute of it. The writings on dance I most admire whether these are by my contemporaries or lions of the past, like Edwin Denby or H.T. Parker - conjure up vivid images of dancers and what they are doing on stage. Opinion is supported by examples or emerges through description. Some of my favorite pieces of dance writing are highly 'critical,' others are not, but none is without the strong flavor of an individual's vision and an individual's feelings.

Of all the kinds of criticism likely to harm dance, dull criticism tops the list.

My own approach to criticism, however, depends as much on my own taste and background as on any high-minded goals I may set for myself. For the first ten years of my writing career, I continued to perform regularly, and I have never quite given up choreography. My inside perspective on dance has been an asset at times, a liability at others; it is always a fact of life. It keeps me fresh and it keeps me humble. My respect for the labor that even the most self-deluding of choreographers, the most imperfect of dancers, must do has often (but not always) arrested my fingers at the brink of a witty put-down. It may be my background, too, that encourages me to try to consider a work on its own terms, rather than to refer to an absolute scale of values. Long ago, I decided that it was pointless to use heavy artillery on small targets...