Poetics Diana Theodores
As a young dancer in New York in the late Sixties and early Seventies a palette of physical sensations were etched into my body memory. I remember the voluptuous flow of Limon classes, the silent terror of Merce's classes, the abdominal endurance of Bella Lewitzsky's classes and the competitive dramas of every Graham class, guts hollowed out in the pursuit of contractions and spirals. I remember the cool, cerebral, articulate and precise adagios of Sandra Neal's Cunningham classes as she talked us through the moment-to-moment of effort and muscle mapping within each phrase. I remember Maggie Black's star studded ballet classes and how she wouldn't allow me to jump because she said I wasn't working from a deep enough plie. I remember trying too hard. Always trying too hard.
And then, in 1972, I was on a subway in New York City with a copy of Marcia Siegel's At The Vanishing Point hot off the press. I read it from cover to cover with that riveted attention and suspension in time that one reads a compelling novel. "When the curtain opens we see" went the refrain; "The dance is about" said each review with clarity and tension. Here was a dance critic and master story teller at work. The notion of dance writing as story telling resonated within my imagination and it has remained with me to this day in 2002 as I try to reconcile my career in dance criticism with my turning point as a fiction writer. For me the labors of the studio effortlessly yielded to the word life of dances after that revelatory reading and dance criticism - in a wide range of forms and media - has been my story, my single-most sustained narrative.
From academic and journalistic dance writings in journals and conference proceedings, research for television dance documentaries and television arts programs, reviewing in New York and Toronto, to writing the first nationally established dance column in Ireland from 1984-1992 and a few books along the way my "critical practice" embraces:
* the publication of dance criticism
* the documentation of choreographic process.
* interviews and dialogues with and about choreographers located within a wide range of approaches and contexts.
* the ongoing project of revising the critical dialogue between choreographers and critics via the organising of symposia, workshops and conferences. These documented activities create shared spaces in which the languages of the studio (choreographic process), the academy (critical theories on dance) and the media (print and broadcast reviewing) can interrogate each other more productively, where a dramaturgy of spectatorship and attention to dance can be investigated further and in which choreographers and writers can observe and access relationships between the physical acts of writing and choreographing.
Stories are my obsession: the stories of dances, body stories from the studio, the stories of choreographic process, stories about characters who inhabit worlds of dance, and the stories of acts of criticism themselves.