Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

Electrification

Electrification   This collection of writings by Sally Banes covers thirty-odd years, taking us from her young, here-I-am beginnings in a small alternative paper in Chicago to the long, sober, Bakhtin-citing essays she wrote as the highly honored Marian Hannah Winter Professor of Theater History and Dance Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Even her beginnings are not shy, however. “An interesting sequence of events happened last week that’s been on my mind ever since,” she says at the opening of the first essay, written when she was twenty-three. “I haven’t figured them out yet.” The sequence of events was a concert by Pilobolus , and by the end of the essay she has figured it out: this must be what college boys think of as dance—innocent, physical. In a review of a concert later that same year, she tells us that she got to be part of the dance: “I take off my glasses and then a sock and start to crack my toes.” The tone is empirical, confiding, assured. When Banes started out, the new imperative in dance criticism was description: sentence-by-sentence accounts of what actually happened on the stage (“she ran upstage, she raised her arms”). This was part of a new seriousness in dance criticism, an effort to cleanse it of impressionism and fan-club effusions. It was also a response to the transience of the art. If these dances were going to disappear, as so often they did, the critic should at least leave a record of what happened—a task that seemed all the more pressing in the case of the new work being done in xv downtown New York, at Judson Church and other venues, in the 1960s and 1970s. Those dances were often one-night-only affairs, and they were widely ignored by the mainstream press. So for a thinking critic, describing the events—and, if possible, interviewing the choreographers and documenting their intentions—came to seem almost a moral duty. The classic example of that critical enterprise is Banes’s 1980 book Terpsichore in Sneakers, a record of the dances done by Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, David Gordon, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, and others at Judson in the 1960s, plus the artists’ explanations, exhortations, charts, and other supplementary materials. But there are good specimens of the method in the present book as well, for example, “Douglas Dunn Talking Dancing” (1979) and “Trisha Brown and Fujiko Nayaka Play Misty” (1980), for the SoHo Weekly News and the Village Voice, respectively. (Those two journals, together with Dance Magazine, were Banes’s two main reviewing outlets in the late 1970s and early 1980s.) The thing to notice in these essays is that unlike much of the other descriptive criticism of the period, they are not boring. To start with, Banes had a preference for the more outrageous sort of work, in which the artists grilled hamburgers or did monster moves or took off their clothes. With such events, even the most factual account was not without a certain piquancy. But Banes’s descriptions, even of more demure work, were not strictly factual . She did “thick description”; she tucked in judgments, nuances. Furthermore , as seriously as she took description, it was only part of what she did. She is a natural and brilliant generalizer. She thinks she knows what the essence of a thing is, and she wants to tell us. So, while she may be reporting on a tap concert (in “Rhythm for the Eyes, Ears, and Soles”), she cannot help adding, in one excellent sentence, what seem to her the unique glories of tap: “a gestural capacity for a true comedy of the body, testing physical limitations and making satire; a format that unabashedly parades the skill, capabilities and intelligence of the human body; the abstract rhythmic qualities it shares with music and the ways in which it makes those abstractions uncannily visible; its fundamentally mundane origins in the act of walking, which makes its intricacies all the more marvelous.” She also can’t help speculating. In her essay on Meredith Monk’s Quarry, for example, she respectfully describes the piece and lets Monk have her say about what it means. But is that all it means? For example, Monk didn’t say much about Quarry’s use of radio—how radio was the medium through which many people got their information in the old days, and how information relates to power—so...