Dialogues: Writing Dance

The articles that follow in this section developed out of an improvised dance and papers presented by a panel of scholars based in the United States and the United Kingdom at the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) 2008 conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. It was a panel that fell into place following a chance meeting at the 2007 SDHS/Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) conference in Paris and the discovery of shared academic concerns over the problems of writing about dance. Team building continued at the CORD conference later that year at Barnard College, moving to a series of email exchanges and conversations about these concerns; finally we came together in a panel at SDHS.

What we had, and have, in common is our interest in developing new writers, and in teaching writing and criticism to students studying dance at the university level. We see many students engaged in the pursuit of different kinds of dance knowledge; some of them are focused on performing and choreographing, and all of them have some level of visual awareness—that is, a sense of what it means to look at, to see, dance. Some students have grown up in a world dominated by visual imagery and are comfortable with that imagery yet unable or unwilling to bring it together with language. Some are afraid that applying language to dance may destroy its essence and inhibit their creativity. Others lack both visual comfort and the ability to use language concretely.

Of course, university students have to write essays as part of their degree, but often they come to college without a clear sense of how to structure language or organize and articulate critical thought. For students experienced in dance, in particular, there is the added challenge of describing and writing critically about a famously elusive practice. As academics, we need to engage and acknowledge the circumstances in which our students see dance and write about it: a world of YouTube and the Internet, a world where dances and responses to them are available in the time it takes to press a computer key—and in which skepticism over traditional printed matter is widespread. We would like to find a way to harness students' seeming love of the image with a close attention to the form, rhythm, structure, and stylistics of language. What we wanted to explore at the Skidmore panel was the experience of teaching writing about dance, the ways that students learn about dance and writing through their joint practice, and the attitude of dance students and dancers about professional dance writing and criticism. We wanted to address these areas through perspectives opened up by our own academic and professional experiences as writers, editors, processors of the text, and dance artists who also write.

How might students be helped to navigate that difficult journey between seeing the dance and thinking about it and then communicating that experience to others? How might they, in the process of developing their writing, become better critical readers? Might they, then, even develop a passion for writing? We decided to incorporate both dance and language into our panel to foreground their interaction. Leslie Satin began the session with a scored improvisation, moving while answering Julie Malnig's unscripted questions about everyday life, dancing, and thinking. Then all three of us presented papers drawing on our own reflective research and empirical experiences, while a DVD of two of Ann Nugent's students engaged in a studio improvisation played. Nugent's paper focused on bringing together the theoretical and historical with studio work; Malnig proposed a range of approaches to teaching critical dance writing; Satin addressed the relationship of intellect and dance, particularly in contemporary choreography. In addition to these papers there was a fourth presentation by noted dance studies editor Barbara Palfy on the precepts and mechanisms of editing and their value to emerging writers.

Ultimately, we sought to raise questions about students' relationship to critical writing about dance—indeed, to consider contemporary approaches to dance criticism. Our audience for the panel included two noted dance...