MoBBallet Dance Writers Convening Reflections

By Rachel Howard

 

 

 

More than twenty years ago, I flew from California to New York for my first Dance Critics Association conference. I was a dance-obsessed farm-town escapee with a few staff positions at small West Coast newspapers under my belt, and I was determined that back in San Francisco I would make a living writing about dance. The DCA conference certainly made it feel possible. There striding across Lincoln Center Plaza with the horde of writers in attendance was my hero, Village Voice writer Deborah Jowitt! Most of the panelists worked in New York, but I met rising and aspiring dance writers from across the country, all of us assuming that our work would carry on, and that our work was important.

In hindsight, this importance could sometimes veer towards self-importance. There were panels with titles like “The Future of Ballet,” with critics expressing their esteemed opinions from on high as to what ballet should be. (At the following year’s DCA conference, I sat on one such panel.) In hindsight, there were no panels I can remember about the ways Black dancers and companies had for the better part of a century been marginalized and othered by critics, and no discussions of the need for more diverse voices in dance criticism, even though we attendees were overwhelmingly white.

So when I received an email invitation to “Dance Writers Convening” at the Kennedy Center, my first reaction—disbelief—drove home how sadly times had changed. Someone was organizing a dance critics conference? In 2024? When there was only one staff critic left at one newspaper, nationwide? But my second thought was that it might be a very good thing that times had changed.

The invitation that organizer Theresa Ruth Howard sent out framed the purpose of the gathering thus: “The 2021 racial reckoning illuminated the systemic exclusion of voices and perspectives of writers of color. This, in conjunction with the truncation or elimination of dance writer positions from publications, calls for an examination of their role and responsibility to the evolving field.”

So, then: This new conference would be not just panels on “The Future of Ballet,” but a conversation about all the things we should have been talking about back when (predominantly white) dance critics had much more status and power. I was white and I was down for that, if this new conference would have me as an attendee. Graciously, Theresa said it would.

For three days, eleven of us dance writers sat in the round inside a Kennedy Center meeting room, not putting forth our supposedly esteemed opinions about what the future of ballet should be, but instead having the tables turned as we faced an interrogation: How do we form our opinions, and why do we express them the way that we do? How would we form and express our opinions if we paused to realize that despite all the signs of an imminent death, criticism was still deeply needed by the dance field—and still had the power to perpetuate harm?

When it came to the need for dance criticism, we writers heard from presenters about the ways reviews are used in the field—to secure grants, to bolster PR, to secure artists’ visas. Many of us attendees wrestled with knowing reviews are used in this way yet staying true to our journalistic calling to serve the reader, who trusts us to deliver an honest and informed response to the dance performance, presenters’ needs aside.

When it came to the harm perpetuated by dance criticism, we heard from active choreographers—including one still hurt by a review that lumped their work in with other choreographers (all Black), claiming their work was stylistically the same, and denigrating it as busy and empty. Reading this review aloud, the choreographer cried. I think it pained all of us in the room to see how the review had affected this dancemaker.

In the months since the conference, I’ve been reflecting on the hurtful sentences of criticism that the choreographer read to us. It seems to me those sentences are an unfortunate example of two ways that dance criticism needs to change.

First, the voice behind the lines was dismissive, harsh, and almost sneering. It was a voice from on high issuing blunt judgment. I know this voice well. It is the imperious voice that dominated newspaper criticism for most of the last century, and it was the norm back when I attended DCA conferences two decades ago, when newspapers were more abundant and powerful, and critics at such publications could presume a position of power.

This is a voice that I learned early in my writing career from a dear mentor, former San Francisco Examiner and later Chronicle critic Allan Ulrich, whose work modeled erudition and style, but also at times channeled an irritated, dehumanizing tone that delighted in putting “amateurs” or “lesser artists” in their place. This is a voice that I eventually moved away from in my own criticism practice, particularly after I took a seven-year break from newspaper reviewing and gravitated towards Buddhism and other wisdom traditions. But it is a voice that many sensitive reviewers (including myself) still slip into, especially if we’ve been reviewing too frequently, or if we are influenced by mainstream newspaper editors who want their publications to project authority.

At the Kennedy Center in July, our small but committed gathering of dance writers talked a lot about this traditionally journalistic “objective” voice, with its attendant dangers of dehumanization and dismissiveness. Several of us worried about the delicacies of pushing back against editors in order to write more personally. As a group, we found consensus about the value of cultivating a critical culture of the “subjective” voice.

The tricky matter we left mostly unaddressed, though, is that an informative and usefully thought-provoking “subjective” voice is much more than a matter of writing in first person. The “subjective voice” can be a boon to the kinds of conversations that help the field. Many of my own favorite critics from the last century practiced it: The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, for one, and the aforementioned Deborah Jowitt, for another. At its best, a subjective voice lets us inside the writer’s personal experience of the art and why it mattered, while still situating the art historically and contextualizing its presentation and reception. The subjective voice depends not on the “I” pronoun, but on a mode of inquiry, one driven by curiosity about the artist’s choices and one’s own responses. But the subjective voice can become less than useful when subjectivity becomes the subject.

As mainstream media coverage of dance wanes in the Bay Area and dancer-driven online alternatives (thankfully) arise, much of the commissioned writing has fallen into this trap, with reports that tell the reader a lot about the reviewer and very little about the art. My hope is that future dance writing conferences will include breakout sections for examining writing that successfully uses subjectivity as an intelligent, informed, curious lens. The field will need such training for future writers as it shifts to new publishing and funding models for criticism. We will need editors able to go deeper with writers and their review drafts, helping writers develop voices that are personal but also informative spurs to art-centered conversation.

To come back to those hurtful sentences that still drew tears from the choreographer many months after the review’s publication: Recall that the choreographer was not only dismissively lumped in with other choreographers, but was denigrated in a group of choreographers who were all Black. Tellingly, the choreographers lumped together in the review actually had little in common stylistically. In short, the sentences reflected an othering of Black dance artists that has been the norm in dance criticism since the early 20th century and continues today.

Which brings me to the other way criticism must change: it must continue to confront our culture’s ingrained biases. A voice of subjectivity will not help a reviewer who writes personally (and maybe even humbly) but who is blind to unconscious bias, who cannot see the centering of whiteness. And I myself have, over the decades, been such an unconsciously biased reviewer.

I left Dance Writers Convening and the Kennedy Center in July refreshed with the belief that the dance field does need criticism. I left certain the field needs more critics, and specifically more diverse critics. And I left convinced that we need more gatherings of dance critics that focus on de-centering whiteness.

Thank you, Theresa Ruth Howard, for the gift of these conversations. I hope for future conferences attended by enough critics to rival the buzzing hordes at the DCA conferences of two decades ago. I look forward to more interrogation of ourselves and our writing—and to moving beyond last century’s all-white panels on “The Future of Ballet.” Let’s continue the work.