Dance Beat: Selected Views and Reviews 1967–1976 by Deborah Jowitt, and: Watching the Dance Go By by Marcia B. Siegel, and: After-Images by Arlene Croce (review)

Books in Review Dance Beat: Selected Views and Reviews 1967-1976. Deborah Jowitt. Marcel Dekker, 211 pp., $9.95 (paperback). Watching the Dance Go By. Marcia B. Siegel. Houghton Mifflin, 345 pp., $12.50 (cloth), $6.95 (paperback). After-Images. Arlene Croce. Alfred A. Knopf, 466 pp., $12.95 (cloth). Jill Silverman During the last decade more people than ever before have been exposed to dance. In spite of the fact that the dance boom has been brought on partly by media hype, commercialism, and questionably appropriated government funding, the fact remains that there is dance on television, in public places, on college campuses, in elementary schools and senior citizen homes all over the country. Dancers are now superstars whose lifestyles are brought to the public in the pages of Us, People, Time and other assorted national publications . Dance has also made it in Hollywood. Millions of Americans can go to their local theatres and watch Mikhail Baryshnikov in technicolor. Dance has become big business. Is this great big dance boom exciting? Is it really the art of dancing-and more importantly, the art of choreography-that is pulling in audiences and selling movies, or is it the trumped up instant glamour of sexy, sleek bodies that draws crowds? Somewhere in this vast sea of dance activity the art must be preserved. Perhaps this is the role of the historians, the critics, and the researchers who spend every moment trying to document the past and present before it becomes the future. They work constantly tokeep the actual stuff of the art as well as its heritage and tradition in front of the public, because only this can prevent dance as commodity from superseding dance as art. 81 Since dance has such an illusory history, its critics often serve two functions : they record and interpret simultaneously. It is the critic who sees the dance, and his reactions are often all that is left of a given work or dancer. In the midst of this current increase in dance audiences, the need for factual background information, critical interpretation and intellectual dialogue is even more important. Critics, like choreographers, have individual dispositions. They have strengths, weaknesses, likes, and dislikes. But there is little question that one of the overall strengths of dance criticism as it has emerged in the past decade has been its ability to re-create the sense of agiven performance. In a world where artists change their styles every twoyears, criticism can be the only means of documenting the recent past. Three volumes of collected dance criticism have been published in the last year; this is somewhat of a feat in itself, and an eminently worthwhile one at that. They vary in style, shape, size and sensibility, but read together they offer a fair portrait of the state of contemporary dance. Deborah Jowitt's DanceBeat: Selected Views andReviews 1967-1976 is a compilation of assorted weekly reviews from The Village Voice and six "think pieces" which appeared in TheNew York Times. Jowitt writes in a pungently informal style that clings fastidiously to the principle set down by Susan Sontag in her famous essay, "Against Interpretation," which is that the critical ideal involves "revealing the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it." Her pieces ardently support the physical stuff of dancing without any accompanying judgments. This might be irksome to some readers , although the continuous Jowitt stance of objective observer produces unique descriptions. This excerpt comes from A BirthdayParty(March 1, 1975; the dancer is Sara Rudner): At first she looks at usfrom time to time, and holds up her hands totell us this is, say, section five-fingers-plus-one; later I think I detect those signals too, but after 12 or so she stops stopping. Here are some events I remember. A licketysplit progress across the floor, full of false starts, and go-back-to-your-marks; rolls with her body folding and sprawling indolently ... Rudner standing almost on the toetips of her shoes, backed up against the wall staring ata point in space. Did she really put that arm stuff on top of an equally complicated foot phrase? Probably. Did she really transfer that arm phrase...