14 Whatever Happened to Dance Criticism?

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 origi- nary 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. 207 9781138234581_C014.indd 207 08/19/19 10:57:13 AM Erin Brannigan 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; 208 9781138234581_C014.indd 208 08/19/19 10:57:13 AM Whatever happened to dance criticism? 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.

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