14 Whatever Happened to Dance Criticism?

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14 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DANCE CRITICISM?

Erin Brannigan

Introduction Dance criticism has undertaken an interesting journey from its historically significant role in establishing the very terrain of twentieth-century theater dance to the crisis in arts reviewing more generally in the early twenty-first century. As a subject of criticism, dance is often lacking documentation, opportunities for repeated viewings, textual equivalents and other associated ephemera to which writers reviewing work in other disciplines may have access. This condition has placed dance criticism at the forefront of developments across the last century and into the twenty-first, with creative critics finding progressive solutions to endemic challenges. This chapter focuses on dance reviewing as it has developed since the early twentieth century in response to the emergence of what French dance theorist Laurence Louppe refers to as contemporary dance: the break with Classical Ballet that produced new forms of theater dance (2010, 23). Writing in Sydney, Australia, the role of dance criticism in my local context is placed into dialogue with the primarily American canon of dance criticism. I begin by detailing some of the generalized conditions of the discipline of dance that interrupt the traditional terms of a critical encounter. The related issue of the central role played by the artist-theorist in the development of a tradition of dance criticism is understood as a unique narrative among contemporaneous art forms, and this is tracked historically from the originary foundations of dance criticism as a discrete field of journalism. This entire historical context can be seen to drive the descriptive turn in dance reviewing in New York in the mid-twentieth century and leads to a consideration of how and why dance, as an art form, forces creative approaches to criticism. Coming full circle, such creativity in dance writing today connects current practices to turn-of-the-twentieth-century experiments between dance, writing and poetics. The chapter ends with an account of dance reviewing in the digital age where, I argue, it is in a unique position to both benefit from, and help renovate, a new age in arts reviewing.

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Dance as the subject of criticism An account of the special conditions of dance as an art form vis a vis criticism will help us understand its history since the establishment of certain aesthetic parameters by the first wave of artists and critics. The ways in which dance resists criticism has much to do with the instability of its primary medium as it is experienced during performance—a dancing body/bodies— which results in an unstable object of criticism. Although the expanded media of dance at the turn of the twenty-first century includes many things beyond, or instead of, the dancing body, for my purposes here I would argue that other elements are always understood in relation to a corporeally determined model of dance and choreography associated with the art form. First, due to the complex spatiotemporal phenomena that is the dancing body/ies—extreme varieties and specificities of movement, relationships between human and nonhuman elements, vari- able perspectives on the action—capturing a choreographic work in any reliable form on film or video is problematic. We will only, in any case, capture one performance, and no singular performance is the same as another due to those same variables. In addition, the presence of the dancing body in a shared time-space is very different from the presence of a body on screen for a viewer. As a corollary of the fact that the human body is this unstable medium, a reviewer will only ever be writing about one instantiation of a choreographic work. These obstacles regarding repeated viewings to “stay with” the work, but also the pos- sibility of the critic and reader sharing the same performance experience, are compounded if we factor in the increasing prevalence of improvisation in contemporary choreography or the practice of performance as part of a much more encompassing and ongoing process. Then there is the brevity of most dance seasons, and the small number of artists able (or willing) to sustain a repertoire. Another factor for criticism regarding the media of dance is the uneasy relationship between corporeal expression and language (despite an exciting increase in the number of artist-writers and artist-theorists mentioned above), which will always leave a significant gap between text-based ephemera and the work itself. But perhaps the most significant impact of the corporeal medium of dance on criticism is the diminishment of our ability to objectify and distance ourselves from other bodies due to inter-corporeal empathy derived from proximity and familiarity. At a very basic level, the body is something that we all have in common; as choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker states, it is the most ancient and the most contemporary phenomena simultaneously, connecting us to both the history of life on earth and our most immediate, present state (2012). Beneath the stories and figures we encounter in movies, plays and novels, the body persists as a touchstone connecting all of us who share its capacities and limitations. When encountering a dance work, rather than shape, color, volume, plot, characteriza- tion, melody, harmony—elements that we might find in music, theater or visual arts and which can be defined to a certain extent and hence idealized/critiqued—the dance critic is often confronted first and foremost with energy, force, tone, weight, movement quality, presence.1 This occurs via a subject very close to the critic’s own in its material and psychological form, often divested of layers of the performance apparatus associated with dramatic theater. An encounter between the body of the critic and the body of the dance(r) engages affect, empathy and contagion, which trigger new configurations that can effectively interfere with the traditional conditions of criticality. Although it is acknowledged that such effects operate in the arts more generally, contemporary dance has a unique focus on embodied aspects of spectatorship for the reasons given here. In philosophy, affect has been used to describe the impact of the work of art on the body of the viewer as a kind of knowledge that occurs before thought (Lyotard 1993;

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Massumi 1995).2 We know that the body experiences sensations before they are realized as cognitive thought, and dance is an art form of sensation par excellence (Massumi 1995).3 Sometimes these sensations never make it to consciousness as recognizable thoughts, feel- ings or emotions, so there is a quantity of our encounter with phenomena (including dance) that slips away from criticality and remains as affect.Empathy has a special role in our “ face-to-face” encounters with each other as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes, and dance studies understands how empathy occurs beyond the face/mind where the body feels the movement of another body when, in fact, it does not move (Martin [1939] 1965; Smyth 1984; Levinas 1991; Foster 2009). Sometimes called “kinesthetic empathy,” it connects bodies beyond emotion, meaning, narrative or character via a purely material contagion between bodies and movement states. This has been explained in the field of neuroscience by way of the operations of mirror neurons, “synaptic connections in the cortex that fire both when one sees an action and when one does that action” (Foster 2009, 1). Engaging us on a subconscious, corporeal level, kinesthetic empathy results in a newly formulated relationship with the work of art where distance is interrupted by a form of physical contagion. French dance researcher and scholar Hubert Godard echoes John Martin when he states, “I believe the supreme contagion to be that of the body state” (Dobbels and Rabant 1996, 46), and we can understand this in relation to our encounter with a dance performance due to our proximity or familiarity with the sensations being experienced by the dancers. This recognized capacity for dance to engage kinesthetic empathy in viewers links it directly to the crisis of criticism in the 1960s, but I will return to the origins of modern dance criticism to track such developments across time.

Movement analysis and artist-theorists The lines between artistic analysis, criticism and artist self-commentary are particularly blurred within the field of contemporary dance, with dance artists consistently playing a role in setting the critical terms for the surrounding discourse. The art form emerged from turn- of-the-twentieth-century modernity when artists were finding increasing public interest in their commentaries, and it developed within a critical vacuum where the standards applied to classical ballet were no longer relevant. Early dance pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller faced critics inadequately equipped to engage with a form that was so new as to be lacking standards for evaluation. Rayner Heppenstal writes of the problem in relation to Duncan: “it seems that nobody who did see her was able to tell about her sanely… there are many writings of those who saw and knew her, varying in waftiness and hysteria” (Heppenstal 1983, 267). Florid autobiographies do not help, adding little commentary on the substance of their work (Fuller 1913; Duncan 1928). As dance theorist and historian Mark Franko points out, Duncan’s own writing “narrates the discovery of dancing” but rarely the “construction of dances” (Franko 1995, 4). Writers who did record their work with passion, insight and creativity were the poet-philosophers associated with Symbolism to whom I shall return. Rudolf von Laban, Ted Shawn and Doris Humphrey were the first twentieth-century dance artists to research and publish formulations for the practice and analysis of dance composition. Laban’s research and writing, published first in 1920 in German, constitutes an integration of both the movement research and analysis that would feed the development of modern dance codes and somatic observation that would inspire radical developments in that direction such as the work of Laban’s student, Irmgard Bartinieff (Laban, 1971). Shawn devised a technical approach at Denishawn and beyond—informed by attention to

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the broadest scope of dance and movement, including traditional dance from around the world—which set out dance fundamentals in a series of publications between 1920 and 1959. This technique produced dancers and choreographers who broke away from Denishawn such as Humphrey, Martha Graham, Charles Weidman and many others (Shawn 1937; Mumaw and Sherman 1981). Humphrey produced a book at the end of her life that docu- mented a “choreographic theory” that would assist the study of dance as a “craft,” co-opting the language of music and design (Humphrey 1959, 18). The collective work of these pioneers both discovered and disseminated disciplinary foundations for dance artists, and the emerging first generation of dance critics must have been familiar with these texts, putting artists in direct dialogue with the arbiters of a new set of disciplinary standards.4 Martha Graham’s musical director, Louis Horst, taught dance composition to generations of dance students in the twentieth century based on the musical model of theme and variation from the late-1920s to the mid-1960s (Horst 1967). This dependence of mainstream choreographic pedagogy on music composition was reflected in the choice of reviewers of the new dance, as we shall see. A new approach to self-commentary from dance artists emerged in the mid-twentieth century in America in line with a widespread wave of artist-theorists across media. Gay Morris notes that the post-World War II period saw the appearance of writing by dance artists and their supporters in Dance Observer (founded by Horst) and elsewhere, and notes that “it is striking how close the connections were between critics and dancers” (Morris 2006, xx). In the following generation, choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti were (and still are) articulate about their experimental approach to choreography (Forti 1963; Halprin 1968; Rainer 1968). Their words, scores and diagrams were included in anthologies and journals alongside artists such as Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg and Donald Judd, who covered the newly intermedial scene dominated by minimalism, neo-dada, happenings and pop art (Young and Mac Low 1963; Battcock 1968; Kostelanetz 1968). The writing of these artists entered into direct dialogue with critics such as Michael Fried and Harold Rosenberg in the visual arts and Jill Johnston who covered dance at the time. This dialogue, and the tight-knit nature of the downtown New York arts scene, destabilized the distinction between artist and critic. More democratic communities of criticality, where audiences were often made up primarily of artists, lead to a new style of dance criticism pioneered in the pages of The Village Voice in New York.5 Continuing this history of artist-led criticism, dance artists have recently produced mono- graphs, articles, DVDs and websites that uncover choreographic processes and provide perspectives that supplement, but also undermine, the authority of the expert-critic (Forsythe, Palazzi and Zuniga Shaw 2009; Stuart and Peeters 2009; De Keersmaeker and Cjević 2012).6 This often involves choreographers engaging their own commentators who have intimate access to their process and are sympathetic with their aims. Choreographers are thus empow- ered through choosing the critical frame through which their work is understood, and this sets a precedent for other “external” critics and theorists who may struggle to contradict the words of the artist. Some dance artists have also become publically outspoken about the state of dance criticism, for example, New York choreographer Miguel Gutierrez in a 2002 article, “The Perfect Dance Critic.” The article is scathing in its account of dance critics as Gutierrez encountered them at the turn of the twenty-first century. He takes aim at the entire field in his critique, from writers through editors, to publications. With explicit accusations of critics’ snobbery and their unproductive attachment to the past, the article ultimately formulates a prescription for a good dance critic. In this artist-authored manifesto for excellence in dance reviewing,

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Gutierrez is calling for informed, articulate reviewing from writers who know the field as it currently stands within the broader arts, are culturally sensitive and self-reflexive, understand the importance of dancer agency in most contemporary work and the renovation of the notion of “virtuosity” in the same, can account for all aspects of a choreographic production, and follow the development of artists across works (Gutierrez 2002, n.p.).

Defining an art form: The first wave American dance critics The important work of the first wave dance critics helped define a new art form that broke with classical dance and began an intense dialogue with the modern arts. Many of the first and second wave dance critics were music critics adapting to cover this new form, as Jack Anderson points out in his article on the influential dance critic John Martin;

Carl van Vechten reviewed dance for The Times before World War I and H.T. Parker covered dance events for The Boston Evening Transcript from 1905 to 1934. Yet van Vechten was one of The Times’s assistant music critics, whereas Parker was also a music and drama critic. (Anderson 1983)

Anderson also notes that, as opposed to some of his peers, “Mr. Martin wrote on dance and nothing but dance.” Importantly, he goes on to correct historical accounts of Martin as the first American dance critic; “strictly speaking, he is not our first newspaper dance critic for, shortly before his appointment in 1927, The Herald Tribune named a dance critic of its own, Mary F. Watkins” (Anderson 1983). Martin was a reviewer for the New York Times from 1927 to 1962. Peers who also made their name as dance critics during this period include Edwin Denby, Doris Hering, Margaret Lloyd, Lincoln Kirstein and Walter Terry, but it is the work of Martin in particular that has been absorbed into Dance Studies and shaped the profile of the Modern dance artists. His serious approach to analyzing and describing the new dance helped legitimize it. In Introduction to the Dance ([1939] 1965), Martin identified the following as key characteristics of the Modern form (both German and American). These would, in turn, become new standards for evaluating further work appearing in the field:

• Space as an “entity” with which to dance (231) • An assertion of dance as an autonomous art form (235) • A reduction to thematic “essences” presented “sparsely and directly” in an “epic” form (241) • Functional rather than representational stage settings (245) • Codified movement systems involving “restraints” and strong links to pedagogy (241–243, 254) • An emphasis on “action and tension” at the expense of “the lower end of the dynamic scale” (242) • Each iteration of the form is a “purely personal emanation” (251)

Another important discovery of Martin’s preempted more recent theories of kinaesthetic empathy. In 1946, he wrote of “the inherent contagion of bodily movement, which makes the onlooker feel sympathetically in his own musculature the exertions he sees in somebody else’s musculature” (Martin 1946, 105) and develops the term “metakinesis” ([1933] 1965 The Modern Dance).

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Like his peers in the visual arts, Martin struggled to accept the new breed of choreographers led by Merce Cunningham, and this definitely delayed the success of Cunningham in his hometown of New York and his subsequent access to government support (Brown 2007, 97).7 Cunningham’s revisions of the art form included his critique of the artist-genius via aleatory methods, the suppression of the dancers’ expressive agency, emphasis on movement- for-movement’s-sake, a severing of music-dance codependence, and the inclusion of everyday movements alongside technical vocabulary among other things. The ensuing revolution in American theater dance presented critics with challenging new work that they met with radical, new critical methods.

Revising critical tools: The descriptive turn A wave of female (and sometimes feminist) critics, beginning with Jill Johnston in the 1960s, brought about a radically descriptive turn in dance reviewing that culminated in the writing of Deborah Jowitt and other New York–based writers of the 1980s and 1990s. Controversial and influential, this shift can be seen as a response to the broader aesthetic milieu in New York at the time, alongside the special conditions of dance as the subject of a review. This historical ‘turn’ also connects with the current productive crisis in arts criticism in the digital age that begs, again, for new ways of responding publicly to the arts. Jill Johnston was writing in The Village Voice in what she calls “a tumultuous decade”: 1959–1969 (Johnston 1998, xi). Trained in dance, literature and fine arts, her writing was approaching “something akin to the theoretical and iconographic work I admired in art,” focusing on description but adding “writerly concerns” that amounted to an experimentation with the review format (Johnston 1998, xi). Immersed in the hotbed of intermedial innovation occurring in the downtown Manhattan art scene in the 1960s, the radical work she was confronted with instigated an intense dialogue with her writing practice that played out, at first, as a fundamental challenge to critical objectivity and distance, and later (in Jowitt’s words) as “a freewheeling, self-starring weekly ramble” that took its form from revolutionary new performance modes (Jowitt 1998, xxiii). Some of her strategies, described by Gregory Battcock and the writer herself, included biographical elements or a “turning inward from art as subject to the critic herself as subject,” blatantly partisan positions in favor of the avant-garde, texts that read more as works-of-art in response to the originary work, and “a confusion of roles” that saw her entering into performances (Battcock 1998, xviii; Johnston 1998, xiii).8 These all made her body of work a disciplinary response to the undisci- plined status quo. Johnston’s exposure to the democratic, improvisational, self-reflexive, self- effacing, pedestrian and compositionally focused work of the generation of choreographers and dancer dominated by the Judson Dance Theater group gave her permission to pursue such things in her writing and thus transform the genre of dance criticism. One of the extreme tendencies in the work of this period was minimalism, and the evacu- ation of content that this entailed was described by Susan Sontag as a “programmatic avant- gardism, which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content” (Sontag 1966, 5). The resulting situation for criticism was summarized in Sontag’s influential 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” in which she argues that “to interpret is to impoverish” (7). In this polemical piece, she claims that “the idea of content today is mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism,” and this certainly played out in new dance works that abandoned story, character, theme, costume, representational sets and emotional expression, turning to experimentation with form, process, composition, syntax, presenta- tion mode and venue (5).

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Developing out of this period, a new school within dance criticism is outlined by Diana Theodores in First We Take Manhattan: Four American Women and the New York School of Dance Criticism (1996). Theodores describes how, between 1965 and 1985, four dance writers— Marcia Siegel, Deborah Jowitt, Arlene Croce and Nancy Goldner—shared characteristics of unapologetic subjectivity, detailed “re-creative” descriptions of both the distinguishing aesthetic and impact of performed choreographies, a lack of recourse to extra-textual infor- mation, and an unrepressed enthusiasm for their subject (Theodores 1996, 1–9). For such writers, analysis begins with the work itself and any conclusions regarding meaning, value or historic-cultural significance are drawn through a close description of form. Jowitt began writing for The Village Voice in 1967 and she continues to run reviewing workshops. In a 1994 workshop I attended in Sydney, she describes an approach that details choreographic work in a form close to anthropological thick description, “as if reporting back from a strange planet” (Jowitt 1994). In her 1975 review of two nights of Grand Union performances (including Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis and Steve Paxton), Jowitt avoids drawing conclusions beyond a return to the theme of “staying with” (Jowitt 1977, 132–134). With clarity she describes many moments within this improvised performance that define its character, giving stability to this most unstable of performance modes. There is a positive and generous tone in her observational mode that suspends judgment, but this is also sympathetic with the terms of the work as she describes how the per- formers emulate our everyday inhabitation of a kind of “coping” marked by patience, effort, compromise, and even a politeness. She also exposes herself in the text as being affected by the work (she wants to try jumping out a window to see if she would be caught, in the spirit of the work) and declares her commitment to the “staying with” that it requires. As an example of the style, this review demonstrates many of the characteristics identified by Theodores and reveals the continuities with, and departures from, writers such as Martin. The influence of this school on writers as far away as Australia was significant. In the Sydney-based national arts magazine RealTime, writers such as Philipa Rothfield, Eleanor Brickhill and I found a platform for publishing nonevaluative, descriptive writing that suited the close-knit dance communities in our major cities, a characteristic that we had in common with the Soho scene in New York that produced Jowitt. In the 1990s, Jowitt entered into a critical dialogue with dance theorist Roger Copeland that lays out the stakes for new configurations between the descriptive, interpretive and evaluative components of a dance review, where one element might dominate over another. In an approach such as Jowitt’s described above, Copeland finds “excruciatingly detailed description virtually devoid of anthropomorphizing adjectives” (Copeland 1998, 102). Copeland believes that a purely descriptive approach to covering dance work could isolate the discipline from ideas and critical debates, aligning dance with “some lost, pre-verbal, Dionysian paradise” that would set back the field exponentially (104). For a relatively new art form that struggles for recognition within the arts even today, the dangers here are clear. Copeland also argues that such an approach silences further discourse because it constitutes evidence as opposed to an opinion; something he refers to as “impressionistic connoisseurship” (Copeland 1993, 26). Copeland’s criticism that the “descriptive bias” results in writing that is “essentially devoid of ideas” is met by Jowitt’s firm counterargument: “Descriptive writing—a certain kind of it—is the best way I know to assert the interdependence of content and form, of narration and movement’s ‘secret truths’” (Copeland 1993, 26; Jowitt 2001, 7). She goes on, “the point is, in searching for what a dance may mean, not to lose sight of what it is, or appears to be,” thus reasserting the centrality of the work of the work in her approach and her belief that

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it is through attention to what is that we cannot avoid discovering what it is about (Jowitt 2001, 7). She sees the binary set out by Copeland, where description is opposed to ideas, as “a new wrinkle in the mind-body split,” and her examples for the coexistence of the two from Croce, Joan Acocella and others are convincing (8). In her examples, meticulous accounts of corporeal behaviors reveal the expanded network of realities, memories, fantasies and contexts that encompass the work, the dancers and the writers in a given space-time, replacing interpretation and judgment with a coextensive “staying with.” The critique of judgment implicit in the American female writers’ reviewing style connects this more recent period back to the poetic writing of Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, and T.S. Eliot when they wrote in response to the abstract ballets of the late Romantic period and the first wave of the twentieth-century European avant-garde. In fact, Jowitt makes this connection clear, referring to Eliot and the new literary criticism that he was associated with as precedents for her approach (Jowitt 2001, 8). The Symbolist poets found in dance a productive mode of expression as an alternative to language-based forms, and a model for their experiments that pushed at the limits of poetry. Writing in 1897, Mallarmé famously wrote of Italian ballerina Elena Cornabla:

I find Cornabla ravishing. She dances as if she wore nothing; which is to say: without the appearance of any assistance offered for a leap or a fall, a flying and blurred presence of gauze, she appears, summoned into the air, supporting herself there, through the Italian trick of keeping her body taut but soft… she does not dance, suggesting, through the miracle of shortcuts and bounds, with a corporeal writing what it would take paragraphs of prose, in dialogue and description, to express: she is a poem set free of any scribe’s apparatus. (Mallarmé [1897] 2001, 108/9)

The link between dance and poetry, which has been taken up in detail recently by Susan Jones (2013), is here in Mallarmé’s description of the dancer as being but not doing, suggesting but not representing, working through her medium to express immediately or directly, here as an untranslatable poetics of movement.9 As Jones says, “the dancer provides, in her poetics, the example of a creative activity in which the presence of the author abides in the very materiality of her production” (16). The poetic pursuit of an autonomous work of art, where the artist’s intention both forms and is fully formed through the medium, explains one way in which dance has moved writers into new territories and techniques, which is clear across this history of the encounter between the two disciplines. One final dance critic of the twentieth century who should be mentioned before leaping through time to the present is André Levinson. In the introduction to the book, André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties, edited by dance critic Joan Acocella and dance historian Lynn Garafola, the editors make a case for Levinson as the first Western dance critic of the twentieth century (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 18). Although Levinson may sit slightly outside of my remit here due to his attention to ballet rather than modern dance, his approach to dance reviewing was influenced by the French writers just discussed and was an influence upon the English ballet critic Cyril Beaumont and the American Lincoln Kirstein (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 18).10 He was perhaps the first to immerse himself in the art form and work hard to find language both from within and without the practice that would serve the work well in review. Also impressive is the range of his writing which crosses dance, film and literature and his attention to popular dance forms, specifically African American artists. Levinson observed dance classes and learned the language of the form, demonstrating a commitment to the disciplinary terms of dance that was unprecedented and utilizing description in a way that preempted the

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work of the late twentieth-century Americans (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 11). Acocella and Garafola conclude that Levinson was “the first to review dance consistently as choreography rather than merely performance, to argue from principle rather than merely from taste, and to draw those principles from within dance itself” (1991, 18). Levinson was the epitome of the experienced and authoritative connoisseur, the model of critic many see facing extinction in the digital era while a democratization of criticism obscures standards, quantity rules over quality, and opinion appears to triumph over knowledge. Beyond such histrionics lies a much more complex and interesting present and future for dance criticism, where the expert-critic becomes one voice among many.

Dance criticism in the digital age In the early twenty-first century, intense debates circulate regarding the fate of arts reviewing in the digital age. In May 2015, the Walker Center in New York ran a symposium, “Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in the Digital Age” (2015), which covered many of the issues in the American context but was representative of the global situation. The central issues confronting the field are

1. The redundancy of descriptive writing (the traditional backbone of art criticism) due to new levels of circulation for image-based art, 2. Polemical reviews that abandon the prescription of balance in favor of broad appeal, and 3. A general attack on standards due to a seemingly unstoppable wave of amateur writers.

The counterargument points to

1. The positive effects of dialogue replacing authoritative monologue, 2. A diversification of voices that liberates criticism from the white, highly educated middle-class, and 3. An increase in the amount of quality writing as a ratio of the overall proliferation.

These issues are international, but the case of the Sydney dance scene will demonstrate how the changes being wrought by the digital revolution play out differently across specific local cultures. In the new context, where connoisseurship tussles with the democratic field of blogging, and visuality dominates over textuality, dance criticism is again well placed to adapt to new contexts and their terms. The proliferation of platforms for publishing dance reviews has been a boon for a form traditionally marginalized in the arts pages of the major presses. With more opportunities to critique and disseminate accounts of choreographic works, these traditionally elusive works of art are circulating in newly expanded ways. And with the early engagement between dance and film/video for documentation and intermedial creative purposes, dance was ready for online formats that privilege image as content. Sydney has had two major newspapers covering dance for as long as I can recall, and with the same reviewers. Regarding local dance coverage, up until the 2000s Sydney Morning Herald (local) and The Australian (national) were joined by a bi-monthly national magazine Dance Australia, “street press” (two or three local free entertainment guides with very uneven dance coverage), and the aforementioned RealTime. In 2018 there was minimal coverage in the major newspapers, but the street press has been replaced by quality writing on a number of online blogs and journals.11 Regarding international coverage of Australian work, in the

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1990s it was negligible. (I seem to recall the editor of Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell being unimpressed at my suggestion that I could cover Australian dance for them in 1999.) To keep up with the world, I had expensive international dance magazine subscriptions and would wait for The Village Voice delivery at my inner-city bookshop once a month to catch up on the American scene. Even today, an online search reveals two articles on Australian dance in Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell in three years. In America, many see the era of print coverage as the glory days of dance criticism. In “The Death of Dance Criticism” in The Atlantic magazine, Madison Mainwaring recounts the sacking of endless dance critics from major newspapers and gives an excellent account of the award-winning writing that substantial print space and well-supported staff can produce. She concludes:

Today, unless a choreographer presents her work at a major venue like Lincoln Center, she’ll be lucky if she gets a single professional review. And the review will be a short one; when critics do write, they do so in less space and with less breadth than their predecessors. (Mainwaring 2015)

This problem is endemic to arts coverage and there is no going back. The Atlantic itself is one of the oldest and most reputable magazines in America, and it went online in the early 2000s, turning its fortunes around (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2018). Although “the steady decline of mainstream exposure to dance” is a serious issue and the loss of an old guard of ground-breaking American reviewers is painful, dance has never been particularly well served by the print economy in Australia, and one imagines many other countries would have similar stories. Furthermore, dance is certainly not alone in having to adapt to a new, primarily online world, although it may have been one of the first arts to feel the effects being at the tail end of the arts hierarchy. Conferences like “Superscript” are looking forward to new online ecologies where the rules are almost unrecognizable when compared to those described by Mainwaring for the print reviewer. Issues regarding text length, hierarchies of coverage, editorial gatekeeping, connoisseurship and longevity have been replaced by modes that are in step with new reader habits and desires. “Post-Descriptive” reviewing, instant reader feedback, image-based review essays, and a focus on communities of participant- readers are all interesting new strategies that are providing solutions to new problems, and with which dance is well-placed to engage. This global shake-up in the distribution of, and access to, critical writing on the arts has combined with the critique of evaluative writing since the 1960s to produce a new situation in the Australian dance community. For local artists, there is a newly expanded circulation of descriptions, videos and images of dance works. Bloggers writing about new work—away from the pressure of mainstream readerships and closer to the artistic communities they are representing (harking back to Johnston and Jowitt’s time)—give detailed and well-informed descriptions of work in open forums where the traditional monologue can become a dialogue with like-minded readers.12 This is worlds away from the ballet blog sites described by Mainwaring where “an abyss of French technical terms and lobby gossip written by and for fans” is a turn off (2015). It is also very different from a situation where dance reverts to “another item in the experiential supermarket, a thoughtless art without a memory” (Mainwaring 2015). Some venues and events have also responded with in-house publications such as Dancehouse Diary produced by Dancehouse in Melbourne and Critical Dialogues coming out of Critical Path Dance Laboratory in Sydney. They are also commissioning writing teams instigated by forward-thinking curators and programmers such as Talia Linz, Melissa

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Ratliff, Angharad Wynne-Jones and Hannah Matthews. For example, the dance-focused Biennale of Sydney 2016 had “The Bureau of Writing” workshop members respond to the work in the program and was an initiative of Artspace, one of the Biennale venues. The Next Wave festival in Melbourne ran a RealTime writing workshop in 2016 by and for young dance artists. And the Dance Massive festival in 2015 ran a writing workshop, “To Write” (2015), and published commissioned articles by participants who included many peer dance artists. What has changed is who gets to express their thoughts about the work and who is respon- sible for the dance archive, and in both cases there has been a substantial return to the artists themselves, or those close to them as discussed above. So an emerging artist such as Sydney-based Angela Goh, whose solo works in small the- aters and gallery spaces would have perhaps had one review in RealTime, now has four that she warrants as useful and well informed.13 Due to this increase in online exposure, new international readerships can access up-to-date criticism of the most current contemporary dance work on offer in Australia. One corollary of this is a new mobility for Australian dance artists, particularly those working in the independent sector who are making the most use of new online fields of communication. These artists are traveling regularly and have more complex international networks than their more mature counterparts who were dependent on government agencies to facilitate touring options.

Conclusion The optimistic outlook here should be tempered with an understanding that the sustainabil- ity of sites dependent on unpaid writers (and a troubling new economy in free media tickets as payment), the limitations of focused readerships regarding building audiences for dance, and the chance of real critical dialogue between writers and community are yet to play out since the very recent closure of RealTime in 2018, our most significant print/online outlet for dance criticism. There is no guarantee that the loss of expert, authoritative and widely read reviews can be replaced by the new economy. As RealTime coeditor Keith Gallasch notes, “the danger is in being romantic about what is barely emergent and in need of some data” (Gallasch, personal correspondence with author, September 25, 2018). However, although Mainwaring bemoans the replacement of high culture with pop culture, some dance makers, reviewers and audiences are enjoying new configurations that dis- mantle hierarchies that have excluded the independent and more popular ends of the dance spectrum from being taken seriously by serious writers. Ideally, the new status quo will have room for everyone—including the insider reports on niche corners of dance activity and informed and critical accounts of our major dance organizations for a broad readership. Looking toward the future we have good reason to be positive: History records that dance is a sector of arts where nimble, creative, experimental and fleet responses to our changing world are part of its broader choreography.

Notes 1 Distinctions between disciplines have continued to dissolve since the mid-twentieth-century avant- garde so that any generalizations of this sort are fraught. For instance, the tendency of experimental dance toward the visual arts calls for a return to compositional analysis, and some non-text-based forms of performance prioritize elements such as movement quality and presence. 2 For an account of the operations of affect (according to the Spinoza/Deleuze/Lyotard/Massumi line of thought), see Brannigan (2011, 184–187). 3 Brian Massumi (1995) recounts a scientific experiment where the body responds to stimulation 0.5 s before the brain registers activity.

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4 We find for instance, in the writing of critic John Martin, references to the work of Laban (Martin 1965, 230). 5 On the increasing case of “audiences of artists” since the 1950s, see Catherine Craft (2012). 6 Jeroen Peeters edited Meg Stuart’s book, which includes writing primarily by Stuart but also by critics, collaborating artists and theorists such as Peeters, Myriam van Imschoot, André Lepecki and Philipp Gehmacher. 7 Influential art critic Michael Fried admits that his singular commitment to the pre-neo-dada and pop artists saw the end of his career with the rise of these new aesthetics, and the same could be said of Martin’s career (Fried 1998, 14). This indicates the degree of investment required of such influential critics in specific trends and the task of championing their associated artists. 8 At its most extreme, it could hardly be categorized as reviewing, as Johnston notes: “At length I gave up even the pretense of criticism, creating pieces consisting entirely of ‘found’ sentences, which I ‘collaged’ non sequitur style, and which I had already been using to preface ostensible reviews” (Johnston 1998, xiv). 9 Susan Jones goes so far as to suggest that the Symbolists’ writing on dance influenced the development of the same (Jones 2013, 14). 10 The editors make connections from Levinson through Lincoln Kirstein to George Balanchine, who fulfils Levinson’s vision of a formal, nonrepresentational, and technical mode of classical ballet (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 23). 11 These include Audrey, Performing ArtsHub, Dance Australia, Witness, Daily Review, Arts Review, Dance Life un Projects, Art + Australia, and Runway. 12 Although the scope of readership for The Village Voice in the 1960s and 1970s cannot be compared to the small community of readers for the online platforms, the spirit of shared knowledges and experiences is similar. 13 Private correspondence with Goh regarding her 2017 work, “Scum Ballet.” RealTime editor Keith Gallasch notes that Goh’s 2016 work Desert Body Creep had five reviews in RealTime by the Next Wave workshop participants.

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