Choreographies of Language: Assessing Ann Daly

Ann Daly, Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

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." All that is lacking is Daly's own commentary on what this debate means to her now.

Daly is no stranger to the way in which both dance and dance writing defy classification. For this reason, she downplays the importance of the three, chronologically-ordered sections into which she divides Critical Gestures: "Writing Dance," which comprises two-thirds of the book, "Making History," and "Theorizing Gender." Yet the last two sections do have a distinct character. "Making History" contains reviews and academic papers that Daly completed in the process of writing her book on Isadora Duncan, Done Into Dance (1995). In "Theorizing Gender," she "charts the trajectory" of her engagement with feminist theory. "Writing Dance" is a compilation of reviews and interviews divided into five subsections: Choreographers, Performances, Images and Exhibits, Books, and Seasons and Occasions. Many of these pieces were written for publications that regularly blur the distinction between "journalistic" and "scholarly" writing. For example, the New York Times published "Conversations about Race in the Language of Dance" (1997), which artfully combines history and theory to preview Ralph Lemon's Geography.

An interesting problem that plagues Critical Gestures, as well as dance criticism in general, is that primarily descriptive reviews quickly lose their vitality unless the language itself is so beguiling that it becomes a substitute performance. It turns out that in order to "preserve" a dance, careful description is not necessarily the answer. In her introduction, Daly asserts that she wants her reader to encounter these essays "as they were originally written" and so she has resisted the urge to revise or update them. Unfortunately, the reader of Critical Gestures is no longer Daly's "original reader." The context for each performance—the significance of its location, performers, cultural "surround"—is missing. What are we to make of a 1986 High Performance review of "Gwall's Exit," in which someone—possibly the Parisian choreographer Yannick Kergreis—is running around with his breasts exposed in a "Barbarella black top"? At the very least, headnotes are needed to identify where these performances took place.

Critical Gestures is not unusual in its compilation of dance criticism without further annotation or commentary. Robert Cornfield, in his 1998 edition of Edwin Denby's Dance Writings and Poetry, limits his editorial presence to the selection of material and a biographical note. For her 1994 collection, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism, Sally Banes provides a brief introduction and reworks her footnotes. What distinguishes Critical Gestures, as Daly admits in her introduction, is its autobiographical quality in which her struggle to "carry dance beyond its curtain time" is always the topic, if not overtly so. It is partly this reflexive aspect of her writing that prompts the reader to demand more than is usually expected from a conventional collection of criticism. We want to know more about what these "gestures" portend for the future of dance studies.

Two major, unresolved issues that recur throughout Critical Gestures concern the market for dance writing and the place of theory in the analysis of dance. In the process of writing the articles...