Rehabilitating Dance Criticism
An intensive talkshop designed to provoke and promote ideas about the culture of dance criticism, its changing contexts and its relationship to contemporary dance practices in Ireland
Vladimir: Moron!
Estragon: That’s the idea, let’s abuse each other.
They turn, move apart, turn again and face each other.
Vladimir: Moron!
Estragon: Vermin!
Vladimir: Abortion!
Estragon: Morpion!
Vladimir: Sewer Rat!
Estragon: Curate!
Vladimir: Cretin!
Estragon: (with finality) Crritic!
As consistent with all Beckett’s plays this scene from the second act of Waiting For Godotis precisely choreographed with stage directions. After Estragon’s final insult Vladimir “wilts, vanquished and turns away.” While scholarly and popular discourse has largely shifted the location of critic from that of parasite to that of collaborator in the creative cycle there is still a lot of work to do to detoxify the climate of suspicion,indifference or victimisation between critics and art makers in our overwhelmingly commodity-driven culture. As Rui Horta suggests “we are all in need of a revised project in regards to the maker-viewer dialogue.”(1) In this re-choreographed version of events an honouring of the collaborative effort in critical dialogue replaces Vladimir’s wilting solo with a contact improvisation duet on “waiting.”
“What are we waiting for?” (impact)
“Let’s wait and see.” (lift)
“How long for?” (fall)
“Until what we’re waiting for happens” (roll)
“Yes, that’s worth waiting for.” (breath)
The task of criticism, like the contact duet is about making connections. In a rehabilitated critical dialogue critic and maker honour the contract that makes art and ideas about art public property and enlivens the connection between art and society. Arthur Miller’s claim that “the theatre we have is the theatre critics have permitted us to have”(2) empowers bodies of reviews with the status of a literature (in that it proposes and parallels a canon of work) but it also alludes to the commodification of criticism as a media that shapes and fixes a“cultural seeing.” We must keep reminding ourselves that artists and critics are involved in a continual process of making and remaking the values by which their work is made. The dance we have must be the dance our choreographers are making and the critical dialogue, accordingly needs to reflect new tasks of observation and new tasks for the dialogue itself.
The Acts of Criticism intensive at the ICD in Cork - the first event of its kind in Ireland - offered a highly charged and imaginative range of session formats from interviews, round tables and panels to workshops and installations that aimed to broaden the debate between makers and critics and to examine how their various languages - of academia, the studio and the media - could interrogate each other. The spirit of activism surrounding this event was driven by a sense of historic precedent-setting. Acts of Criticism was part of the Irish Arts Council’s 50th year celebration of funding and fostering the arts which was marked by a series of events titled the Critical Voices Programme. Across all arts disciplines these events spotlighted dialogue between national and international critics and Irish artists. The Acts of Criticism intensive also marked the inaugural year of ICD’s dance-writer-in-residence project, the first such commission in Ireland and very possibly in Europe. The cultural “readying” in Ireland signaled by the dance criticism intensive and the dance writing residency will be reinforced by an ongoing series of activities over the next two years including dance criticism workshops and the spotlighting of new writers for dance in print and broadcast media, documented talkshops for Ireland’s choreographers, published conversations between writers and choreographers, choreographic residencies and labs for experimentation and research and the first International Dance Festival in Ireland in Dublin, May 2002.
The economic boom that has brought such a radically shifted cultural and financial prosperity to Ireland has also shifted some of the barriers dance has had to surmount historically creating a cycle of what ICD director, Mary Brady calls “loss and recovery.” More dance companies are enjoying consistent, committed funding, the mass migration of trained dancers from Ireland to Europe and beyond in search of work has stabilised and reversed noticeably as more opportunities to activate, innovate and sustain work in a dance community in Ireland are supported. New legislation for the arts due to be published soon will even include choreographers as members of Aosdana - Ireland’s unique way of honouring artists of excellence and providing them with tax- free status. But as Brady cautioned in her opening remarks at Acts of Criticism “high productivity - continually being asked to produce work in quick succession, also has its costs in increasing materialism, in depleting our sensuous and affective lives...The payback...seems to reside in a need for some more profoundly satisfying cultural experience...”Keynote speaker, Sally Banes proposed it is “through writing and talking about dancing that provides us, as a culture, with a means of collaborating in this production of meaning.” As Douglas Dunn once proposed “Talking is talking. Dancing is dancing... Talking is dancing. Dancing is talking.”(3)
The choreographers who performed at Acts of Criticism had evidently all just read this playful manifesto en masse. Although uncurated the platform revealed a culture of choreographers obsessed with text and the spoken word - an observation that weaved its way through the day’s efforts in wording dance. Roland Barthes’ theory that criticism does not discover the work in question but rather covers it as completely as possible by its own language(4) had a run for its money here as each choreographer “danced back”(5) with a meta meta text of gestured utterance.
Collaboration as critical dialogue was pursued by Heidi Gilpin, former dramaturg for William Forsythe, in her session via audio link-up from Amherst, Massachusetts. Gilpin, in an eloquent and meaty interview with Professor David Williams from Dartington College unpacked a series of proposals about the inherent language of questions in acts of dramaturgy, how they shaped her dialogue and working methods with Forsythe and his company dancers, and ways in which this dialogue contributed to Forsythe’s choreographic language. Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Method workshop pursued another kind of energy and methodology for critical dialogue. Led by choreographer and facilitator, Peter Di Muro from Washington DC’s Dance Exchange this seven - step observation and question practice proposed a system for responsible critical dialogue between makers and viewers. Choreographer, Liz Roche offered a duet section from her new work These Two People Forgot in Silence as a laboratory for participants and over a remarkably attentive and willing two-hour session Di Muro, in dialogue with Roche and viewers teased out a series of propositions on the framing of questions, readings of movement, assumed values, and the visible and invisible motivations driving the moment to moment of making work and of looking at work. Collaboration was also an engine driving the projects discussed in the Dance Publishing in Ireland session and which signaled the urgency for dance writers and collaborative writing projects to “get down” Ireland’s dance history and the emerging but fragile history-in-the-making of contemporary dance culture as soon as possible. In a late afternoon round table discussion that “reviewed the reviewers” and the culture of newspaper reviewing in Ireland overall choreographers exposed a near revelatory rigour of articulations about critical writing and a collective commitment to further critical dialogue over a range of sites and contexts.
The Place Theatre’s Resolution! Review series online is one very useful model for enabling such dialogue. Other innovative practices such as the Conversations on Choreography series from 1999 - 2001 in Amsterdam (School for New Dance Development), Barcelona (La Caldera Space) and Cork (ICD) - durational, thematic, documented discussions between critics, theorists and choreographers for an audience - point to the emerging trend for intimate, highly focused intensives and think-tanks over unwieldy conferences for deeper productivity and a more charged attention to the processes of critical dialogue between making, viewing and writing.
The quality of our attention determines process and also outcome. The American theatre director, Anne Bogart says that to observe is to disturb – as in quantum physics the act of observation alters the thing observed. (6) To observe is not a passive verb. Amongst its various definitions can be found words like “making,” “learning,” “doing,” and “to honour,” “to treat with ceremonious respect,” and “to regard with attention.” Attention, continues Bogart, is a “tension over time” – the time of performance, the time of writing and the cultural time of "our time", "this place", these artists, these products of our dialogues.
In a time when critical consensus has collapsed and the death of the author has bequeathed us a collaborative role in the production of meaning the culture of criticism is simultaneously in search of and creating a new sustainability. As we grapple in our theatre of memory (7) with the vanishing act of dance and as technologies are increasingly embodied by doers and viewers new dramaturgies of spectatorship emerge. The project of rehabilitating criticism requires new attention to the shared space of writing and dancing. Graphic writing systems that express the body’s motor force, notations that flow directly out of the sensation of moving, improvisation envisioned as “mark making,” digital media and software programmes for choreographers, and choreographers’ own word-based writing practices (including their fluent languages of bureaucracy where, increasingly, the methods of getting work are becoming the work) are accessible source materials for research and dialogue. The dynamic collision between the formalist structure of review writing (8) and its immediate here and nowness, the more fluid, invented forms of essayist criticism that offer increasingly provocative proposals about re-presenting dance, memory, and notions of fiction and theoretical writing on critical and cultural perspectives on the body are equally vital and accessible resources.
Dancers, choreographers and writers spend a lot of time looking, witnessing, tracing with their eyes, mapping with their muscles. They are constantly taking in and trying out. Rehearsing. Making new space in their bodies for the writing down of performance. This act, in the words of Julia Kristeva is an “ordeal.” The physical, intellectual, sensuous and practical systems operating in these acts of writing for critics and choreographers could stand mutual workshopping in shared spaces from time to time in the same way we workshop, retreat and “lab” in discipline specific sites.
Acts of Criticism and its encore projects literally and metaphorically seek a shared space of critical dialogue. In his essay, “The Finding of a Voice” director, Peter Sellars invites all artists “to find a struggle and live there.” A rehabilitated criticism finds the writer living in that struggle too and in living there we ask, critics and choreographers, what are we making? what are we seeing? what are we saying? what are we reading? How are we collaborating in the production of meaning? If dance makers, viewers and critics in Ireland want their dance to move forward their critical dialogue has to invite tough questions, has to live in the struggle. Acts of Criticism reflected on some ways forward in the dialogue between the persistence of dance and the insistence of criticism.
Notes:
(1) Rui Horta. “The Critical Distance.” Dance Theatre Journal. Vol. 13, No. 3, S/97, pps. 14-15.
(2) Carol Brown. “Tall Stories.” Dance Theatre Journal. Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001, p. 24.
(3) Douglas Dunn. “Talking Dancing.” Read at the New School, October 9th, 1973 and published in Terpsichore in Sneakers by Sally Banes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980, pps. 200-201.
(4) Barthes, Roland. “What is Criticism?” Debating Texts. ed. Rick Rylance. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987, p. 83.
(5) Jordon, Stephanie. “Dancing Back.” Writings on Dance. Vol. 16, 1995, pps. 8-18.
(6.) Bogart, Anne. A Director Prepares. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 72.
(7) Lepecki, Andre. “As If Dance Was Visible” Performance Research. Vol. 1, No. 3, 1996
(8) Morris, Meghan. “Indigestion: A Rhetoric of Reviewing” Writings on Dance. Vol. 16, 1995, pps. 34-35.