"But How Do I Write about Dance?": Thoughts on Teaching Criticism

For the past several years I have taught an advanced writing seminar at New York University's Gallatin School called Writing About Performance. While dance is not the only focus—we write about various forms of live art—it is indeed a central component. The students are from a range of backgrounds; many are dancers, but not all. Most have some interest in the arts; some are journalism students, others anthropology and art history students. The mix is refreshing, if sometimes challenging, as many of them are unschooled in various forms of contemporary performance.

I have discovered a curious phenomenon in these seminars. At the beginning of the course, as we review the syllabus and I discuss the assignments, there is invariably one student, if not more, who either boldly raises her hand, or quietly approaches me after class, to say that she is terrified of writing about dance.¹ One student (who turned out to be a fairly strong writer), went so far as to plead with me—"I'll write about virtually anything, but please don't ask me to write about dance!" Others tell me that they are willing to try writing about dance but declare they know nothing about it—or don't understand it (more on that later). Then there are the practicing dance students who are usually curious, if a little wary, at the prospect of translating their kinesthetic understanding of dance into prose. But they labor under a slightly different constraint in that the forms of dance they feel most comfortable writing about, and which they feel they "know," are those they have studied—usually ballet or some type of modern dance—and not postmodern dance (more on that later).

My syllabus explains that the course aims to help writers train their "eyes" to enable them to become more critical viewers of performance and then translate that "looking" into descriptive and analytical prose. Easier said than done, for sure. As it turns out, by the end of the semester many a student has accomplished just this, and it's thrilling to see a student open her eyes to dance and performance in a way that she hadn't before, to discover the joy of inhabiting language, to see that words are visceral and that, as writer Jeanette Winterson notes, "she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels" (1995, 172–73). But what I would like to ponder with you are some of the reasons why students so often, even in a self-selected class, resist this type of writing, and what some of the possible avenues might be to alter their preconceptions, re-calibrate their expectations, and literally get students to open their eyes to the phenomenological experience of the dance itself: not only to report on their "experience" or their "feelings" but to address—with their senses fully turned on—what they saw.

One of the reasons, I believe, for students' resistance to many of the tasks I ask of them (and this includes writing a straight-up "performance description," with absolutely no evaluation) is their preconception, whether they are fully conscious of it or not, that criticism is a form of writing that tears down rather than opens up; judges rather than analyzes; exhibits superiority over the subject rather than asks questions. Certainly the problem is not limited to the classroom; connoisseurship critics—or, what dance critic Ann Daly has called "canon criticism" (2002a, xxxiii)—exists in varying degrees of extremes all around us, in the daily newspapers and popular press. At its heart, this kind of criticism, as Daly notes, "becomes the enforcement of a set of standards regarded as universal and eternal, and, hence, objective" (xxxiii). I don't want to demean this type of criticism altogether—we have had many of our own eloquent connoisseur critics, such as Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce; Denby, for instance, in his exacting and elegant prose, helped pioneer new audiences for modern dance. But the kind of criticism I am referring to, and to which students seem to respond, is a "thumbs...