advance praise for
Critical Gestures:
Writings on Dance and Culture
"Critical
Gestures offers reflections on Ann Daly’s critical practice;
her responses to experiment in choreography and performance as well as
to books, exhibitions, and conferences; and her contributions to feminist
and cultural theory. The writing is perceptive, persuasive, finely detailed,
and engaging."
Selma Odom
Department of Dance
York University
"Feminist theory and dance studies are two phrases rarely uttered in the same sentence. A discussion of either notion would seem unlikely to provide a bridge to the other. And yet, both share a fundamental concern with what our bodies mean, as Ann Daly's Critical Gestures makes clear. … Dance fans, feminist theorists and those curious about the contemporary arts all will find thoughtful analysis in this rich, well-written collection."
Tracy McCabe
Ms. Magazine
Summer 2003
"It is in this critical, thoughtful, and challenging transfiguration of dance into writing and back, in this zone of dialogical indeterminacy where boundaries between the moving body and the moving word become fluid, that Daly excels. What strikes the reader of Critical Gestures the most is how carefully crafted the language is, and how Daly's experience as a reviewer affords her more scholarly writing a clarity and fluency that are enviable. The reverse is also true: her formation as a historian and cultural critic comes about in particularly vivid ways in the interviews Daly conducted with Bill T. Jones and with Deborah Hay. Here, the historian, the theorist, and the reviewer find ideal peers, intellectually fierce interlocutors."
André Torres Lepecki
Theatre Survey
May 2004
"For Daly, the goal of dance criticism is not the judgment of canon criticism, as some would have it, nor is it to 'stave off the loss' associated with the ephemerality of dance. Instead, she wants us to understand that criticism 'is a gesture that carries the dance beyond its curtain time, extending it to readers near and far, present and future.' Summing up, she tells us that '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'" (xvi). Ultimately then, this book is an excellent reminder that dance and dance studies will (and should) continue to trouble the boundaries of many of the most pressing issues pertaining to identity, art, performance, and politics."
Michelle Dent
TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies
Spring 2004
"[These essays and reviews] position Daly as a significant contributor to the evolving critical discourse. She's been on the frontlines during the past two decades, and this collection touches on all the growing pains of a period that saw ethnographic and multicultural forms become commercial successes in American arts programming and identity politics enter the mainstream, while contemporary dance itself, according to Daly's mentor Marcia B. Siegel, was in a 'fallow period.' The volume is divided between Daly's reviews of specific performances, and scholarly analyses of choreographers (Pina Bausch, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, et al.) and her theoretical/historic concerns, including several pieces on her previous specialty, Isadora Duncan. Daly stakes an occasional risky opinion and can write a fine sentence, like this one referring to Arlene Croce's infamous 1995 New Yorker "victim art" review: '"Discussing the Undiscussable" was Croce's way of taking her marbles and going home, because artists had dared to move from the 1950s to the 1990s without requesting her permission.'"
Chris Dohse
Village Voice
8-14 January 2003
"Ann Daly begins her introduction to this collection of dance history and criticism in a surprisingly lyrical mood, asking, 'Why else would anyone practice criticism, except for love?' This is the writer who crashed into many imaginations with her 1987 TDR piece on "The Balanchine Woman," where she examined the representation of gender in modern ballet and found only 'an iconographic hangover from the nineteenth century.' While Critical Gestures may be read in a conventional manner, as a selective gathering of reviews, interviews, and scholarly essays produced from 1985-2001, it pushes beyond this publishing genre to an extended argument between the author and herself. At issue is the point of writing about an art form 'that disappears as soon as it is created.'"
Nancy G. Moore
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
September 2003
"…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." —Ann Daly
In a remarkable collection of discourse on contemporary dance — organized as a triptych with three sections: "Writing Dance"; "Making History"; and "Theorizing Gender" — the essays and critical texts in Ann Daly's Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) provide an entry way to the study of contemporary dance and a look at why critics enhance the appreciation and understanding of art forms.
Daly, who decided that she wanted to be a dance critic in her sophomore year, begins by setting forth a lifelong vision of dance writing. "Why else would anyone practice criticism except for love?" she asks.
In the heart of the book, she presents twenty years of contemporary dance — covering selected choreographers including Isadora Duncan, Pina Bausch, Deborah Hay, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Ralph Lemon, Jane Comfort, Kazuo Ohno, Merce Cunningham, Molissa Fenley, Susan Marshall and many others, as well as performance artists, dance photographers, and critics and dance historians—in a series of essays originally published in the New York Times, High Performance, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, the Village Voice, Texas Observer, and Dance Theatre Journal, among others.
Her descriptions of performances are detailed and evocative:
About Pina Bausch's Nur Du, she writes:
"Act II opens with a despondent dancer, Julie Shanahan, approaching the edge of a redwood forest as if she were arriving at the rehearsal studio — dressed in her civies, dance bag slung over her shoulder. Standing with her back to the audience, she is the lonely figure out of a Caspar David Friedrich landscape, humbled by the exalted vista spread out before her. Ms. Shanahan confides to the trees that she doesn't have any ideas. Or any costume. She's not wearing high heels. But still she came anyway. 'I don't have a hairdo,' she continues. 'I'm not wearing makeup. I'm Sorry. Anyway I still came.' And then she screams."
About Ralph Lemon's Boundary Water she writes:
"In Boundary Water, for example, men and women amuse themselves separately in Eden-like tranquillity, but their partnering is marked by a pattern of aggression and withdrawal. Women suddenly go limp when they are picked up and dragged across the floor. A woman flings a man from her and then embraces him. Lemon's own solo, Wanda in the Awkward Age, portrays the emotional and physical contradictions and frustrations of adolescence by embedding passages of gracefulness, feet-stomping, and body spasms within each other."
Also explored in Critical Gestures are the relationships between dance, visual arts, film, and writing; between the performer and the audience — often through the words of dance creators.
In an interview, Bill T. Jones talks about how dance stands on its own, noting that if he had not actually experienced the work of a hero of his, Merce Cunningham, reading about the work would not have brought it to life.
He also talks about the relationship between the spectator and the dancer, responding to what Ann Daly refers to as his "short-circuiting the spectator's desire to be seduced" in his early solos, by saying:
"Language was one way it was easy to do that, particularly when people come to dance with the idea that it is a mute and transcendent experience and I'd say: 'Oh no it isn't. Just at this moment when I have you here, this gesture is so tender, and you're loving it so much, then I will say this.' Why do I do that? Why do I distance you like that? I distance you so that you and I have to work to come back together, because I believe that this is a metaphor for what all human intercourse is really about. Falling apart and fighting back together."
In another essay, Daly quotes performance artist Carolee Schneemann as saying about "Fuses," a filmic rendering of the artist and her partner making love:
"And I wanted to put into that material of film the energies of the body, so the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense — like how one feels during lovemaking."
Through reviews of the work of choreographers and dancers, Critical Gestures incisively approaches issues such as race, sex, and gender. For instance, Ann Daly writes in an essay originally published in Choreography and Dance and included in "Theorizing Gender," the concluding section of the book:
"....No one theory or framework or approach is appropriate for all
objects of study or for all researchers and the questions they choose
to ask. Only intellectual flexibility will enable us to broaden, deepen,
and enrich the field of dance history. There are many women to write about,
many questions to ask, and many stories to tell. Women's lives in dance
are not reducible to a formula, and it is only appropriate to the spirit
of a feminist project to respect and even encourage difference as the
very condition of both change and knowledge."
Judy Malloy
Arts Wire Current
# 11, no. 40
October 2002