Extending Critical Voices Between the Lecture Room and the Dance Studio

The majority of students come to us at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom, where I am a dance lecturer, because they want to develop careers as dancers, choreographers, or dance teachers.³ They are usually attracted by the opportunity to improve their dance technique and/or to be creative rather than to align themselves with the more conventional avenues of academia, and for most writing will never be a career contender.⁴

I teach writing courses at M.A. and undergraduate levels and find that students are often uncomfortable about letting their visual awareness carry over into writerly incisiveness. They erect a perceptual barrier between studies in the dance studio and the lecture room.⁵ They may understand something about the structuring of a dance, and they may be interested in exploring anything that gives them opportunity for "self-expression," but if they have to write about dance critically they fear their inadequacies will be exposed. Among those who feel passionately about the act of dancing, there are mixed feelings about seeing dance and translating what one sees into prose, for it might kill that passion.

Yet all writing relies on the power of an individual mind and the ability to engage with ideas, and writing about dance—even the most academic and objective—needs to be creative, especially where criticism is concerned. We have only to compare responses to a performance to see how differently people see things and make sense of them. The critic has a freedom to engage with concepts and ideas, but it is a freedom that must be related to what happens in the dance work. I stress the importance of seeing what happens because so often students respond negatively to what (in their view) has not happened, or what is absent, and in this way they miss the pleasure of discovering the many layers of a dance work. As the seminal writings of Edwin Denby and John Berger remind us, there is always more to see and always more to think about.⁶

During university study, as students perceive how to build up historical, aesthetic, and critical understanding, learning how to look will undoubtedly develop. They will be helped too because they themselves have danced and have an understanding of how it feels (somatic knowledge) and of how watching dance generates kinesthetic awareness in the watcher; this is a point to which I will return.⁷

Doing and seeing are activities using different kinds of energy, and those who want to release their energy in the studio and on the stage often feel crushed—even dulled—by what they think of as the "static" activity needed for seeing, thinking, and writing. Putting the word "static" in quotation marks lends an element of irony to something that requires a lot of activity, in the brain at least. Discovering what a dance means is never easy because there is so much to take into account, but sometimes our bodies know what we have seen before we are able to find ways to express it. Then the challenge is to find the words that properly represent what we think and feel; often the knowledge can be found lurking somewhere in a dancer's "beingness," and physical reenactment of the dance can trigger the desired articulation. The evidence of this becomes obvious when students are seen puzzling over words but can get up and demonstrate what they saw and reveal dancerly intelligence in replicating something of the choreography. The task then becomes one of translating different kinds of knowledge and experimenting with mutation between the physical and the literal.

If our students are excited by the activity of dancing, then why not turn this excitement to advantage? What goes on in people's heads when they are dancing, and how is this to be communicated? Can we relate critical studies to experiential dance, to open up other kinds of insight? I invited my students to write about themselves in an account entitled "A Life in the Day of . . . ."⁸ Suddenly they found enthusiasm for articulating their hopes and...