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4. On Your Fingertips: Writing Dance Criticism
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24 Writing Criticism / History ences between the two kinds of inquiries are simply greater than the similarities. Interpretive anthropologists are engaged in making critiques of their own interpretations; dance criticism is not nearly so reflexive. Ethnographers are moving toward a dialogic construction ofcultural texts, but as critics we remain - and, I would argue, should remain - distant observers . Who wants to coauthor their review with the choreographer? But we are distant observers at home. Anthropologists work outside their culture , or as outsiders to subcultures within their culture; we work, for the most part, right inside the mainstream of our culture, and we write about events for other people inside our culture who share our expectations and values. Shouldn't there be room in the world for both kinds of discourse? Above all, as I suggested earlier- and this, I believe, is connected to our writing as insiders, for insiders- we bring to bear on our object ofstudy an evaluative purpose that ethnographers have historically shied away from. If ethnographers, operating from cultural relativism, refuse to make judgments - whether aesthetic or moral- but, rather, look for evaluative criteria outside their own experience, inside the other culture, our job as critics is constantly to internalize, refine, create, and apply our culture's criteria to our culture's products. We are less like the ethnographer and more like the ethnographer's native informants, who do the evaluation for her, using emic judgments, who lead the anthropologist to the best artwork or the master artisan, who act as messengers from deep inside the culture. 4 On Your Fingertips: Writing Dance Criticism Paraphrasing Goethe on theater criticism, Edwin Denby once wrote that "a writer is interesting if he can tell what the dancers did, what they communicated, and how remarkable that was."l This statement sounds almost banal, if not obvious. But in fact it sums up several different, often This material is taken from the forthcoming book Anthology on Dance Criticism, Lynne Blom and Susan Lee, eds. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. © 1995 by University of Pittsburgh Press. Writing Dance Criticism complex operations that a critic can perform. These are: description (what the dancers did - what does the work look and feel like?); interpretation (what they communicated-what does the dance mean?); and evaluation (how remarkable it was - is the work good?). To Denby's list I would add another critical operation: contextual explanation (where does the work come from aesthetically and/or historically?). For the critic's job is to complete the work in the reader's understanding, to unfold the work in an extended time and space after the performance, and to enrich the experience ofthe work. This may be done, ofcourse, even for those who have not seen the work. Not all critics perform all these operations, for reasons ranging from ideological commitments to the practical constraints of their jobs. It goes without saying that these are not the explicit rules of our profession; many critics perform some or all ofthese operations intuitively. The purpose of this essay is to bring these critical activities to light and to begin an analysis of their role in dance criticism. Evaluation pure and simple is the function often forced on the daily critic. This is criticism at its crudest-the critic as consumer guide. Here, for instance, is Theophile Gautier's review ofLe Lutin de la Vallee. Gautier explains that what is key to this ballet is the dancing. "The work," Gautier writes, "does not exist by itself and could be described in four lines; but it furnishes the dance with an auspicious frame and that is all that is necessary ." He does give a plot summary (more than four lines long), but adds that he considers this information quite perfunctory: "Now that we've done away with the plot, and we must give it this credit that it is neither long nor complicated, let us immediately get to what is important - to the dance." And then he goes on to treat the dance, in terms that are primarily evaluative: Mme Guy-Stephan exhibits as natural talent an extraordinary lightness; she bounds up like a rubber ball and comes down like a feather or a snowflake. Her foot strikes the floor noiselessly, like the foot of a shadow or a sylphide, and each jump is not echoed by a dull sound ofthe dancer landing which recalls the marble heels of the statue of the Commander [in Moliere's Don Juan]. Study...