writing dance

Dance Research Journal 41 / 2 winter 2009 89

Dialogues: Writing Dance

Julie Malnig, Ann Nugent, and Leslie Satin

The articles that follow in this section developed out of an improvised dance and papers presented by a panel of scholars based in the United States and the United Kingdom at the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) 2008 conference at Skidmore College

Julie Malnig is an associate professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She is the author of Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance (New York University Press, 1995) and most recently editor of Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2009). She has written extensively on twentieth-century social and popular dance in numerous publications. She also publishes in the area of feminism and performance; one of her recent essays is “All Is Not Right in the House of Atreus: Feminist Theatrical Renderings of the Oresteia” in the collection Feminist Revisions of Classic Works (McFarland, 2009). She is a former editor of Dance Research Journal (1999–2003) and has also served as editorial board chair for CORD. Malnig holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University.

Ann Nugent is a dance critic and senior lecturer in dance at the University of Chichester, where she specializes in criticism and European dance. After more than a decade of writing about Wil-liam Forsythe’s work—a doctoral thesis (University of Surrey, 2000) and some forty published articles and papers—she is finalizing a manuscript for publication entitled Writing William, Read-ing Forsythe: A Critical Approach to William Forsythe’s Choreography. She is British correspondent for Shinshokan Dance Magazine in Japan and was previously editor of both Dance Now and Dance Theatre Journal. She is a board member of the Society of Dance History Scholars and chaired the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for three years. She began her career as a dancer with the company now known as English National Ballet.

Leslie Satin is a choreographer, dancer, writer, and teacher living in New York. Her dances and interdisciplinary collaborations have been presented at many venues in New York City and else-where. Satin holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University. She is a member of the Arts Faculty at New York University’s Gallatin School; she has taught at Bard College and State University of New York/Empire State College. Satin, who recently co-edited Move-ment Research Performance Journal 34, was a long-time member of the editorial board of Women & Performance. Her performance texts and other dance writings have appeared in Performing Arts Journal, Dance Research Journal, Theatre Journal, Dancing Times, Women & Performance, and Gesto (Brazil), as well as the anthologies Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance (ed. Gay Morris, Wesleyan University Press, 1996) and Re-Inventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible (ed. Sally Banes, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).

90 Dance Research Journal 41 / 2 winter 2009

in Saratoga Springs. It was a panel that fell into place following a chance meeting at the 2007 SDHS/Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) conference in Paris and the discovery of shared academic concerns over the problems of writing about dance. Team building continued at the CORD conference later that year at Barnard College, moving to a series of email exchanges and conversations about these concerns; finally we came together in a panel at SDHS. What we had, and have, in common is our interest in developing new writers, and in teaching writing and criticism to students studying dance at the university level. We see many students engaged in the pursuit of different kinds of dance knowledge; some of them are focused on performing and choreographing, and all of them have some level of visual awareness—that is, a sense of what it means to look at, to see, dance. Some students have grown up in a world dominated by visual imagery and are comfortable with that imagery yet unable or unwilling to bring it together with language. Some are afraid that applying language to dance may destroy its essence and inhibit their creativity. Others lack both visual comfort and the ability to use language concretely. Of course, university students have to write essays as part of their degree, but often they come to college without a clear sense of how to structure language or organize and articulate critical thought. For students experienced in dance, in particular, there is the added challenge of describing and writing critically about a famously elusive practice. As academics, we need to engage and acknowledge the circumstances in which our students see dance and write about it: a world of YouTube and the Internet, a world where dances and responses to them are available in the time it takes to press a computer key—and in which skepticism over traditional printed matter is widespread. We would like to find a way to harness students’ seeming love of the image with a close attention to the form, rhythm, structure, and stylistics of language. What we wanted to explore at the Skidmore panel was the experience of teaching writing about dance, the ways that students learn about dance and writing through their joint practice, and the attitude of dance students and dancers about professional dance writing and criticism. We wanted to address these areas through perspectives opened up by our own academic and professional experiences as writers, editors, processors of the text, and dance artists who also write. How might students be helped to navigate that difficult journey between seeing the dance and thinking about it and then communicating that experience to others? How might they, in the process of developing their writing, become better critical read-ers? Might they, then, even develop a passion for writing? We decided to incorporate both dance and language into our panel to foreground their interaction. Leslie Satin began the session with a scored improvisation, moving while answering Julie Malnig’s unscripted questions about everyday life, dancing, and thinking. Then all three of us presented papers drawing on our own reflective research and empirical experiences, while a DVD of two of Ann Nugent’s students engaged in a studio improvisation played. Nugent’s paper focused on bringing together the theoretical and historical with studio work; Malnig proposed a range of approaches to teaching critical dance writing; Satin addressed the relationship of intellect and dance, particularly in contemporary


choreography. In addition to these papers there was a fourth presentation by noted dance studies editor Barbara Palfy on the precepts and mechanisms of editing and their value to emerging writers. Ultimately, we sought to raise questions about students’ relationship to critical writ-ing about dance—indeed, to consider contemporary approaches to dance criticism. Our audience for the panel included two noted dance critics, Deborah Jowitt and Marcia Siegel, who pointed to the integrity needed for writing about dance and spoke to the value of dance writing as an essential discipline. Our long-term goal is to continue this conversation with publication here, which we hope will prompt reader responses about new initiatives for teaching dance writing and, more broadly, the relationship of dance and writing in and out of the academy. We would like to open up a world in which dancers and dance students could be encouraged to articulate their experience of dance and in so doing become exhilarated.

“But How Do I Write about Dance?”: Thoughts on Teaching CriticismJulie Malnig

For the past several years I have taught an advanced writing seminar at New York University’s Gallatin School called Writ-ing About Performance. While dance is not the only focus—we write about vari-ous forms of live art—it is indeed a cen-tral 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 phenom-enon 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 writ-ing 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 stud-ied—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 view-ers 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 stu-dents 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 ex-pectations, and literally get students to open their eyes to the phenomenological experi-ence 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 stu-dents’ resistance to many of the tasks I ask of them (and this includes writing a straight-up “performance description,” with abso-lutely 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 news-papers and popular press. At its heart, this kind of criticism, as Daly notes, “becomes the enforcement of a set of standards re-garded 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 au-diences for modern dance. But the kind of criticism I am referring to, and to which students seem to respond, is a “thumbs up, thumbs down,” consumer variety of con-noisseur criticism that enables students to hide behind a veneer of self-importance that masks their inability to have really penetrat-ed the performance at all. This leads me to the second problem of students not trusting their ability to ap-prehend the work for what it is. On the one hand, when students engage in judgmental criticism, it is often because they are as yet unequipped to respond to the work by plac-ing it in its aesthetic, historical, or cultural context; this is knowledge they have yet to acquire. But also, I believe, they often sim-ply confuse opinion with experience. From the students’ perspective, to write from one’s experience often means stating whether a thing was good or bad rather than, in the Susan Sontag-ian sense, of attempting to explain what the work did, how it worked on them, and what elements provoked specific reactions. As dance critic Deborah Jowitt (2001) has explained so convincingly in “Beyond Description: Writing Beneath the Surface,” descriptive writing, when done well, does more than look at surface details; it may contain within it an analysis and in-terpretation of how the dance does what it does. Granted, this type of “thick descrip-tive” writing is a discipline to be learned; it takes practice. And partly for that reason many young writers want to get through the description quickly, before the easier and what seems like the sexier (and fun) part of delivering an opinion. A third issue, shared by dancers and nondancers alike, is the difficulty of writing specifically about postmodern dance. For many student writers, postmodern dance


seems to connote some “secret language” for which they feel they lack a code. My sense is that any dance that doesn’t convey an overt “expressiveness” of character or a narrative pull poses problems for the young writer. If the work contains the semblance of experience that mimics real life, then the writer feels on surer ground because she can attach “meaning” to it. This is Sontag’s argu-ment in her seminal essay “Against Inter-pretation” (1979), of course, that the urge to connect the artwork solely to its “content” is in part an attempt to make it manage-able, containable, and therefore explainable. While on the one hand it seems that stu-dents might find variations of postmod-ern dance to be more accessible than other forms of dance—because of its democratic impulse, its matter-of-factness, and its pe-destrian movements (movement, of course, that dance theorist Susan Foster reminds us was “reframed” for performance and “newly ordered” [1986, 169])—it nonethe-less usually baffles young writers. Although this is a much larger discussion, one reason may be that postmodern dance challenges ingrained ideas about the “theatrical” and doesn’t tell spectators what to think, or, as Foster notes, “how to watch” (185). How else, then, might we envision the experience of criticism and critical writing and draw young writers in? What might be some new modes for engaging them? One way is simply to expose them to different ideas about performance criticism. Near the beginning of each semester, I have students read the late performance historian Michael Kirby’s unveiled polemic, “Criticism: Four Faults.” From the get-go he states: “Theatri-cal criticism, as we know it, is primitive and naïve, arrogant, and immoral” (1974, 59). He calls “pseudo-objective” the kind of judg-mental criticism that is essentially more

about the reviewer’s own taste and pref-erences than the work itself. Many critics, Kirby notes, “objectify their taste, confuse description and evaluation, and substitute subjective feeling for objective detail” (66). An avowed formalist, Kirby goes on to pro-mote what he calls “performance documen-tation,” a totally value-free criticism un-burdened by the reviewer’s own subjective views or judgments of the performance, and one that will function as an historical record of what occurred, how audiences reacted to a piece, and the impact the work had in its social and political moment. Kirby’s abandonment of the subjective altogether makes his proposition problematic; surely, one of the pleasures of reading criticism is to be moved by another’s description and understanding of a performance and there-by discover, as Edwin Denby explained, “an unexpected aspect of one’s own sensibility” (1947/1968, 414). But from a pedagogical perspective Kirby’s essay is useful because it stirs up students’ ire in a usually productive way that challenges their assumptions. Kirby was writing from the position of scholar/critic, but it also can be helpful to have students read essays by, or hear from, working critics on their relationship to their craft. I have in the past invited to my class cultural arts critic Matthew Gurewitsch (a writer for the New York Times, and other publications, on theater, opera, and dance) who offers the refreshing view that criticism is not just about reviewing. Gurewitsch tells students that what motivates him to write every day is to think about a subject that arouses his interest or creativity. “What kind of world do I want to live in?” asks Gurewitsch. “Making people curious is my aim,” he has said. In a revealing New York Times piece, “Critics Should Look at Art But Also at


Themselves,” cultural critic Margo Jefferson responds to a question a friend asked her about what she, as a critic, would like to change about the way critics work. Jefferson says that she would

like us to ask questions as vehe-mently as we sling judgments. We’re still inclined to believe that critical authority comes mostly from assertion or virtuoso displays of intellectual mastery. What about intelligent questions asked forth-rightly? What about admitting sometimes that we’re not sure we’re asking all that needs to be asked? And what about ambivalence? Well expressed ambivalence is as inter-esting in criticism as mixed motives in fiction or microtones in music. (2000, E2)

Jefferson urges the critic to be open to art-work beyond her traditional purview, to be up front about one’s own biases, and to risk balancing vulnerability with a sense of authority. In another example, novelist and es-sayist Joyce Carol Oates, in a piece in the New York Review of Books, builds on this idea of the “self-effacement” of the critic as a characteristic to be admired. She quotes from a passage in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to make her point. In the open-ing scene, as Oates recounts, an observer comments on the eminent writer Gustav von Aschenbach: “‘[He] always lived like this’—here the speaker closed the fingers of his left hand to a fist—‘never like this’—and he let his open hand hang relaxed from the back of his chair.’” Says Oates, “What more appropriate image for the art of criticism: the tightly closed fist, the open and relaxed hand? The one concerned with defining

boundaries, passing judgment, inflicting punishment; the other with presenting the subject sympathetically, pushing beyond boundaries, a predilection for appreciation and praise?” “Contrary to what might be assumed,” says Oates, “it is far easier for the critic to revile than to reveal” (2007). Another strategy, both in the classroom and perhaps (dare I say) within the profes-sional world of criticism, might be to try to narrow the gap between writer and performer so that each might see themselves as contrib-uting to the critical and artistic enterprise. In the mid-1960s iconoclastic performance and dance critic Jill Johnston claimed that criticism was a place for the writer to “stake out a claim to be an artist” (1965/1971, 100). As Ann Daly has noted, Johnston “took seri-ously the [ Judson dancers’] credo that mean-ing is made by the viewer and that anyone could be a performer” (2002b, xxvii). In her 1965 essay “Critics’ Critics” (in part a response to a blistering article on the state of contem-porary criticism by Clive Barnes), Johnston argued for a type of creativity that might include the writers’ own visceral response to the work and a writing style that evinces the style of the dance. She comments, too, on the long, historical tradition of the art-ist’s statement and urges more dancers and choreographers to “practice the art of writ-ing about their work” (101). Reading more of these kinds of artist statements, and includ-ing them in their own critiques, might offer students a different understanding of what dancers themselves experience in the process of choreography itself. It might foster more of an internal exchange with the dancers’ ideas to disavow the still prevalent notion of the critic’s role as “speaking for” the “mute” dancer. And, finally, what if we could engage our student writers with actual dancers and


choreographers, invite them to the class-room (or make the classroom the studio) and have them share their work and their ideas and insights about their work? Cho-reographer Liz Lerman’s “civic dialogues,” for instance, in which she engages commu-nity members as part of the creative pro-cess, may be a way to think about bringing writers closer to performers. In her Critical Response Process—subtitled “A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert” (2003)—Lerman employs a four-step system that involves a series of structured questions posed to both the performer and a respon-dent; the idea is to help audience members deepen their understanding of the work and help artists push their thinking fur-ther. Lerman’s interest in writing about her dancing stemmed, in part, from her desire to “give myself a voice” in response to the varied critics writing about her work (1995, 1). More than a “feel-good” exercise for both parties, as Ann Daly has noted, her process, which she developed in 1990, has evolved into “a truly dialogic model characterized by moments of what she [Lerman] calls ‘colliding truths’” (2002c, 10). It’s interesting to think about what type of critical exchanges might get ignited if,

employing Lerman’s model, the critic be-came the “respondent” in dialogue with the artist. It is true, of course, that artists and critics have different missions and pre- occupations, but a closer coming together of the two might break down and demystify a process that too often pits the all-knowing and educated critic against the intuitive, nonthinking dancer/performer. I realize that I have emphasized what young writer-critics seem not to be doing, but I am of course encouraged and delighted when they do begin to break through their own resistances and get underneath the sur-face of the work, as in one student’s critique of Bill T. Jones’s Still Here, which she refers to as a “brashly bold piece” that “stings the senses and hurls the hearts of its viewers into rapid palpitations of agony and ecsta-sy.” Or another, on Elizabeth Streb’s “aerial creatures”: “Once airborne, their bodies take the forms of beautiful birds, backs arched, one leg tightly pressed against the other, arms longing to reach the corners of the ceiling and, as their faces stretch to confront the audience’s, they happily scream their names.”2 It’s these stirrings and glimmers that give me hope—when the writers begin to open their eyes, see with their senses, and behold what is there to be seen.

Extending Critical Voices Between the Lecture Room and the Dance StudioAnn Nugent

The majority of students come to us at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom, where I am a dance lecturer, be-cause they want to develop careers as danc-ers, choreographers, or dance teachers.3 They are usually attracted by the opportunity to improve their dance technique and/or to be

creative rather than to align themselves with the more conventional avenues of academia, and for most writing will never be a career contender.4

I teach writing courses at M.A. and un-dergraduate levels and find that students are often uncomfortable about letting their

writing dance

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