excerpt from
Critical Gestures:
Writings on Dance and Culture
Why else would anyone practice criticism, except for love?
I didn’t fall in love with dance as a ballerina wannabe, which is the more usual story. I fell in love with dance as a journalism major in college, when I attended my first dance performance. It was Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet, and most of all I was eager to see how they could possibly tell the tale without words. By sophomore year I decided to become a dance critic, for two reasons. First, because in dance I had discovered my own peculiar susceptibility, to bodies that speak without talking. I got it. Dance totally absorbed me — all of me, intellectually, emotionally, kinaesthetically. Second, because it was obviously impossible to write about.
So I enrolled in dance classes and cross-registered for dance history courses. I volunteered at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, where I sat in on classes and rehearsals. Thanks to People Express airline, I could fly home weekends from Pittsburgh to New Jersey to catch my first glimpse of Merce Cunningham at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton or Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins at the New York City Ballet. I clipped dance reviews from the New York Times and the New Yorker and taped them into huge three-ring binders.
I had stumbled across the New Yorker in high school, amidst the library’s shelves of current periodicals. A single "Talk of the Town" piece, recounting a milkman’s rounds, claimed me for non-fiction. I aspired to write so well — with such seemingly transparent apprehension—as to render a milkman’s rounds worth a dozen column inches.
For me, writing has always been "about" something. I studied literature, then art, then dance, and paused here. Dance seemed far afield from my academically-oriented upbringing, but, then again, I had been a mad fan of high school wrestling and professional tennis. These sports, like dance, require a convergence of mind and body. As games of solo strategy, they depend upon a player’s sensitivity to dynamic interplay. One’s stroke, or one’s move on the mat, happens in response to and anticipation of the opponent’s. Decisions become coincident with action. In sports this sense of palpable necessity is known as "the zone." In dance, it’s called "presence." Observing how the body thinks and the mind moves remains my unexhausted fascination.
What was it about that New Yorker piece? It showed me what writing can achieve: that, by deeply and devotedly observing the world, the writer enlarges that world. Dance gives us the world under glass. Because it is enclosed, dance is easier to see than the apparent randomness and infinity of everyday life. At the same time, it is also harder to see, because of its semantic density. Dance is distilled social relations, writ large and buck naked. As such, it magnifies questions of identity and culture. Dance can register our faintest tremors, revealing the unruly desires and gaping vulnerabilities that we spend so much energy trying to hide, and deny.
I am a person of language and logic in thrall to the murmurs of the body. It alerts me to my remote sensations, relieves my too-rational habit, and reminds me of my damped desires. Unlocking the dance is tantamount to unlocking myself. Some people challenge themselves in extreme sports. For me, it’s experimental dance. Can I fine-tune myself to a new expressive frequency? Can I bring to this dance what it needs in order to be seen? In the process, I become more visible to myself.
My primal scene of criticism came in the seventh grade, in religion class at St. Christopher’s in Parsippany, New Jersey. We were assigned an essay on an article of our choice from the diocesan newspaper; in order to avoid the subject at hand, I picked a music review of Roberta Flack’s "Killing Me Softly." I was astonished by how much the reviewer could find to discuss in a three-minute pop song and how much more interesting it then became to me. That review — a close reading of the lyrics — initiated me into the twin towers of criticism: identification and interpretation. It taught me that there is a universe of significance in a song and that this significance is called into being by an empathic writer/commentator: the critic.
Flack’s plaintive phrasing is easy to recall. With it, she transforms the song from adolescent infatuation into performance theory. She captures the critic’s exquisite longing—both painful and pleasureable—for the performer who sings a good song, who has a style. And when the critic is seduced by the performer, or, perhaps more accurately, by her own desire to perfectly possess that style, she experiences immanent obliteration. "Killing Me Softly" is an allegory of critical erotics.
When I’m anxious, I organize. If my desktop is in order, anyone else’s will do. Criticism, not dissimilarly, is about sorting out the morass of perception into something orderly and interesting. It’s about discerning relationships and making meaning. A dance critic must listen long and hard to a dance (at least, to an experimental dance) in order to discover how it needs to be understood. In this sense, criticism takes a deferential position. After all, I’m not the topic of conversation, the dance is. And yet here I am center stage, proffering what I saw, what I felt, and what I thought. Criticism is the practice of appearing to disappear.
Experience ripens the critical sensibility—its eye, its ground for understanding, its accumulated knowledge, its personal voice. If youthful criticism gains by its fresh perspective—the expansiveness of the beginner’s mind—mature criticism gains by its complexity and self-assurance. After 20 years, it is still the beginner’s mind that appeals to me. That’s the flow I seek in critical practice, when an unfamiliar performance requires me to find or create new pathways out into the world.
I find it difficult to try to separate the perceiving from the writing, because it’s in the writing that I figure out what I know about a dance. At some point, the dance becomes a prompt for the words. I love it when the words take the lead. With eyes closed, I feel them approaching, their weight and rhythms taking form and taking possession. I write about dance because I prefer verbs, and moving targets. I thrill to sentence structure: syntax is, after all, about moveable parts.
The dancing I love best is the kind that’s so physical it becomes metaphysical. Some years ago I tortuously belabored the point in a conference paper I delivered. Afterward, a fellow panelist’s husband—he had attended our session—approached me. "Of course," he said. "I only look at the dancers’ bodies when there’s nothing else to see."
I like to watch, and I love to learn. In dance I found an experience that engages my eyes and mind equally. It provided me with a way to analyze gender representation and to research American cultural history. I’ve learned about all manners of beauty and about power—the power of illusion as well as the illusion of power. As a cultural practice, dance yields endless material for both the journalist and the scholar. I’ve never given up either writing practice, trained as I am in both of them, and over time I have worked to hybridize their respective strengths, the clarity of journalism with the rigor of scholarship.
Despite the clarity, despite the rigor, the words fail. Encountering the ineffable, the words fail to deliver my experience of it. From the beginning, this paradox was the better part of my attraction to dance criticism. Initially I was invigorated by the writerly challenge, which I must have expected to someday overcome; nowadays, I can more ably refuse the impossible burden of translation, although the sense of dispossession lingers. I read a lot of Artaud. "All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it. True expression hides what it makes manifest. […] This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose."
Choreographer Neil Greenberg once suggested to me that dance criticism is an attempt to stave off such loss, because the dance critic, whose passion is for the fleeting, unrepeatable moment, insists on trying to repeat it. But I don’t think that dance is any more fleeting and unrepeatable than any other aesthetic experience, and I don’t think that criticism marks a discontinuity with the dance. Criticism is a gesture that carries the dance beyond its curtain time, extending it to readers near and far, present and future. Criticism transfigures dance into a much larger, discursive existence. (For Allan Kaprow, even Happenings remained in circulation as "leftover thoughts in the form of gossip.")
Ultimately, the critical gesture is the best we can ever hope for: that someone will pay attention. I lean in, the dancer’s double and the reader’s surrogate, offering myself to be written upon by the dance and, in turn, to write it. I partake in what Merleau-Ponty calls the "flesh of the world." His description of perception is as accurate an account of the critical act as I have found: "[I] follow with my eyes the movements and the contours of the things themselves, this magical relation, this pact between them and me according to which I lend them my body in order that they inscribe upon it and give me their resemblance." From a distance, the critic is poised, porous, and, as Deb Margolin correctly suspects, wanting to touch and be touched. It is a surpassing gesture, like Pollock’s excursive stroke, the one that touches without making contact.