"How NOT to Write, So Dance Will Matter" or, More context please!

In her article "How NOT to Write, So Dance will Matter", Apollinaire Scherr turns the tail on dance, saying we're culpable for the lack of audience for dance.

Audiences are smart. Dance attenders are saavy. They don't lack knowledge, ability or interest in appreciating dance performance, they lack context.

We're not supplying enough context.

We need to supply more context.

Here's some of her discussion (find these excerpts and the rest of the article here) :

"We've let movement description dominate our reviews for too long. You know, "Miriam Morningflower lifts her leg, whirls, climbs on her partner's back." We show and show and show, when we ought to mainly tell.

Or if a dance reviewer is particularly short on space -- as in the New York Times -- she summarizes each work on the program, then adds opinion for spice: a salty laundry-list review. On the rare occasion that she is granted more space, what does she do? Add more movement description! (If the Times upped the typical wordage to 500, from 350, she'd eventually figure out what to do. Right now, she's caught in a vicious circle: editors aren't generous because writers don't use the extra space well, and writers don't use it well because they haven't had the practice.)

The usual defense is that description is a form of contextualizing. Yes, but an insider's form. If someone already knows about dance, then she knows what it means that a dancer moves in one way rather than another. For everybody else, explication is in order.

...

Description-heavy reviews came to prominence in the '60s among downtown critics of the avant-garde. The reviews resembled the dances themselves: factual, investigative, and not very interesting if you weren't already clued in to the thinking behind them.

Most reviews still resemble those dances, except now there's that sprinkling of snark. What they lack is argument, which is how a civilian figures out what's at stake.

...

The preeminent 20th century dance critic Arlene Croce -- at the New Yorker for more than two decades and somehow mainly remembered for her essay on Bill T. Jones and what she dubbed "victim art" -- never buried dances in an impressionistic haze, and she was parsimonious in her descriptions of passages of movement. But she always made a powerful case for why the dance mattered or didn't -- to all of us, not just readers in the know. And she never presumed that if you didn't know about dance, you didn't know about a whole lot of other things.

...

People won't discover dance until critics express more curiosity and insight about the culture it's wedded to. Since dance isn't sealing itself off from the world, why are we?

When a dance does live in a crypt, though, critics should take note."

I hear people in the dance milieu ask all the time - how can we build audiences for dance? It would be a good start to ask audience them what they lack in dance performance. If it's context, give them context. Experiment (which is what we do in art all the time anyway) and try something new. Maybe audiences will respond to your fresh approach, and maybe you will end up getting what you want.

- R