What do you get when a dozen dance writers gather in a room? No, not an overstuffed clown car.

by Marcie Sillman

 

 

 

 

Marcie Sillman, award winning independent, award winning dance writer based in Seattle and former host of the cultural podcast Double Exposure. You can find her writing on her Substack,   She is also a regular contributor to the Seattle Times, Pointe magazine and other Dance Media publications. She is the 2019 winner of the Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award.

 

In the case of the MoBBallet Dance Writers Convening: Examining the Role, Responsibility and Relevance of Dance Writing in a Changing Landscape, writers were invited to the Kennedy Center by the organization’s founder Theresa Ruth Howard. She is a ballerina, writer, teacher, editor and social justice activist. The Dance Writers Convening was organized in conjunction with their Pathways to Performance Choreographic Program debut in the Eisenhower Theater. I readily accepted her invitation to join colleagues from across the continent in  Washington, DC. I was curious to learn more about how independent arts writers could evolve our practices.

As an event adjacent to a gathering of emerging Black ballet artists, one goal of the Dance Writers’ Convening was to explore our role in both examining and depicting the artistic output of Black dancemakers, and to try to assess the possible impacts of what and how we wrote about it. But on the first afternoon we spent a chunk of time griping about low pay and the lack of publications.

It was a lot like a group therapy session.

Sometimes it takes a jolt to separate you from your daily routine, something to push you to revise the way you see and respond to the world around you. Normally we journalists are too caught up in our immediate assignments to spend extra time probing larger, more theoretical challenges. Howard’s invitation provided an opportunity to hit the pause button on the quotidian tasks involved with writing about art; it was an opportunity to take a breath and remind ourselves why we do this work.

I’ve been a public radio journalist for more than 40 years. My mandate when writing about the arts has been to serve as a translator, to try to make theater, music and dance accessible to an audience who might have little to no formal background, training or exposure. The goal, in mainstream journalism, has been to avoid writing stories that could be perceived as too “artsy.” Arts writing, particularly writing about Western classical art forms like ballet, has never been as popular as, say, sportswriting, and has become even less valued as local journalism’s overall worth has declined.

My colleagues at the MoBB Convening were from a range of professional backgrounds, from dance-specific publications to those with a more academic bent to generalists like myself. Our one-on-one conversations illuminated how we all mourned the loss of column inches devoted to arts writing, as well as our varied approaches to addressing the challenges that face dancers (of color) as well as the dance community itself in this post-COVID era. This gathering was my first opportunity in 15 years to reframe my writing.

In 2009 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded me a three-week fellowship in dance criticism, in residence at the American Dance Festival in Durham NC. I spent that time with a dozen other arts writers, watching writing, and talking to my peers about dance. To this day I think of that time as ‘dance camp;’ central to shaping my approach to chronicling an art form I love. And yes, we’re allowed to love what we write about, the same way sports writers more overtly express their love of, say, football.

In the late 20th century when I was trained, most of us had been coached to put a distance between our own opinions and the subjects we wrote about, a facade of neutrality. The NEA fellowship marked a turning point for how I thought about my journalistic career. That experience brought me to the realization that I could embrace my subject at the same time as I attempted to chronicle it as objectively as possible.

I began to strive for balance: if I interviewed an advocate of preserving ballet as it was presented in 1890, say, I needed to give equal time to somebody who embraced the creation of new ballets that didn’t require pointe shoes, buns or even heterosexual love stories. ‘Dance Camp’ gave me permission to embrace the art form; it also marked the launch of my print dance writing career. Slowly, I began to think of myself as part of Seattle’s dance community, as “we.” I wrote about the region’s many artists, from Pacific Northwest Ballet to the scrappy independent dancers who just graduated from Cornish College of the Arts.

After my official retirement in 2021, I didn’t dream I’d get another opportunity to reshape my thinking so radically. But in mid-2024, the MoBBallet Dance Writers Convening invitation struck me as Dance Camp version 2.0: all the thorny issues to tackle in less than a third of the time, three days instead of three weeks. I was eager but intimidated.

The majority of us are white females, who write across genre, race and culture. Personally, in early 2018 I had made a conscious choice to write predominantly about artists of color. My intent was to broaden the field of artists that received regular coverage, to normalize the inclusion of artists of all backgrounds, rather than shunting some artists in a silo reserved specifically for them.This convening made me question what equipped me to do this work, other than innate curiosity? And how could I approach it without inflicting harm with assumptions I might make?

I think my Convening cohort craved the time and space for conversations like these. Almost all of us had been watching our local performing arts organizations weather the months of economic fallout from COVID-19 shutdowns, and we’d also chronicled ongoing work those organizations were doing to make themselves better reflect America’s demographics. The time was ripe for some serious writing about art and artists in 21st century America.

 

In my neck of the woods, Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet Artistic Director Peter Boal and Executive Director Ellen Walker had been working on this evolution, with dancers and other company members, for several years before the pandemic. I met Howard in the process of writing about the changes I saw at PNB. I was especially intrigued by her approach to opening access to artists of color.

Howard has applied her personal ballet experiences to the way she talks to ballet companies about how to realistically, and effectively, dismantle barriers to creating truly equitable environments. Her work with PNB has been both visible (pointe shoes and costumes that match skin tones, for example) to changes that aren’t as apparent to the human eye (fostering workplace cultures that value input from everybody from administrative employees to artistic staff).

I also welcomed Howard’s ability to approach her trainees with a sense of empathy; I had interviewed her about how she managed to bridge distances between management and staff at companies where she’d worked, and sensed that she could provide that same level of compassion when it came to helping dance writers achieve a better understanding of the depth of those changes and how we might chronicle them more accurately.

My first Dance Camp experience was about showing us how to not just look at a performance but also what it meant to see its nuances. Dance Camp 2.0 fleshed out those nuances and helped me to realize how the constraints of mainstream journalism had limited the ways I’d been writing about them.

We arrived at the Kennedy Center the Sunday before July 4, 2024, to a tightly packed schedule. The planned opening discussion was meant to examine our perspective on our role and responsibility as dance writers (meant to last an hour and a half), but quickly pivoted to our immediate needs: how to get decent pay for competent dance writing, and how to convince editorial gatekeepers that dance deserved column inches. Instead of moving us along her agenda, to her credit, Howard followed us writers where we led: a conversation about low pay and decreasing outlets for arts writing.  Her obvious enthusiasm and identification with our concerns paved the way to forging a mutual trust that might have taken longer to build than the three days we had.

I confess that, for me, this process felt a bit like plunging into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s novel is about a man’s journey into Africa to find a white man who had “gone native.” But the book is a deeper exploration of colonialism itself and how and why we humans make the moral choices we make. My first reading, and subsequent contemplation, led me deep into how I think about and identify myself, about who I am and how I wanted to make what I considered to be moral choices in writing about ballet and about the world in general. Some of the choices were momentous and obvious: who I choose to devote my platform to. The impact of others were less obvious but no less consequential.

For example, several years ago, when writing a profile of a new PNB apprentice corps member, I had assumed the non-binary dancer wanted to help create new ballets that de-emphasized traditional pointe work. I had been watching choreographic changes at PNB and was excited by the contemporary dance I was seeing. This new PNB apprentice also appreciated the new repertoire, but also was seeking the opportunity to dance pointe roles in traditional story ballets like Swan Lake and Nutcracker.

I had broadened my writer’s focus to look beyond the historical subject matter of classical ballet tradition, but I hadn’t learned how to open my lens to see beyond my ingrained opinions. This is just one example of the many stumbles and missteps I’ve made.

But my personal and professional epiphanies didn’t emerge immediately upon my arrival at this Dance Writers’ Convening, and certainly not without a lot of internal dialogue and soul searching prompted by Howard’s workshops. I also spent a lot of time alone with my thoughts. I face an ongoing sense of impostor syndrome and all the anxieties I carry as a 70-year old white woman who has made a conscious choice to write predominantly about artists of color. Given my background, what wasn’t I seeing and considering? The task of revamping a lifetime of cultural biases and assumptions seemed like an overwhelming weight. It would be infinitely easier to slink away to a beachside cabin to drink cocktails and read mystery novels.

I spent the first evening in Washington in my hotel room, looking through my writing on Substack, and rejecting all of it as trite and contentless. Like Joseph Conrad’s protagonist, Marlow, I’d set out on a journey not certain of my destination, and every insecurity was magnified. Yes, I wanted to know how to more accurately talk about dance artists of color who moved in a predominantly white art form, and I wanted to understand more about the challenges they face.

I also had myself 80% convinced that it was time to chuck my career.

I was particularly thrown when one of Pathways’ choreographers became emotional as they described the impact of one dance writer’s uninformed assessment of their work. How could we write about an artwork without doing harm to its creators? I was mistrustful of my own opinions, second guessing everything I had believed for so many decades.

But my Eeyore attitude toward what has been my passion began to shift after a particular exercise about how our personal backgrounds shape the lenses we’re looking through.

In our third session we writers were presented an image Howard projected on the screen of Kathryn Pauly Morgan’s Wheel of Privilege and Dominance: a bisected sphere, like a globe with an equatorial belt. The upper half of this sphere displayed terms that described traits or markers of societal norms  that could be perceived as privileges, while the lower half was filled with what could be perceived as less desirable traits. We were asked to note traits which applied to us in either hemisphere and numerical values were ascribed.

 

 

Obviously, racial identity was tallied. But so were things like native English speaking, religious background, age, gender, you name it. As a white woman, I hold a privileged position in this society, but it isn’t as simple as Black versus white. My skin is white but my cultural background isn’t Norman Rockwell Protestant. I’m a senior citizen, raised Jewish in a Christian country, I’ve developed different lenses through which I see and evaluate an artist or artwork than have my Christian colleagues. For instance, I don’t and never have celebrated Christmas so I don’t watch the annual production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker as a sweet reminder of past Christmas rituals. My family endures rather than celebrates Christmas time; it reminds me of my otherness.

Reading my list of traits, privileges or not, I began to realize how deeply, and often invisibly, we carry our identities and our inherent cultural biases. I also started to recognize how complex each of us is, how uniquely we each regard the world, and how so many people’s cultural mores are still left out of setting the standards.

My reaction to these personal epiphanies sounds almost simplistic; of course we each differ in a myriad of ways, but the realization was freeing. You can’t be an impostor if you give yourself value, equal to what others convey on the same subjects. I had been so busy thinking about those whose worth had been ignored or deliberately bypassed that I had come to devalue some of what made me me.

The revelation helped me take a very big step toward acknowledging the legitimacy of both my background and the platform from which I write. It’s not that somebody holds a more valuable platform, but that each platform has its own viewpoint, and every view holds equal and legitimate weight (except, in my opinion, for a stand that overtly discriminates or hates).

Each of us comes from a place shaped by both external situations and our individual cultural experiences, each is an individual tile in the mosaic of our lives. I had cracked open a window to a fresh idea, although I’m still on the journey towards jettisoning my impostor syndrome.

As I contemplate my place in the evolving mosaic, Howard’s dance writers’ symposium has given me a better appreciation of what I have to offer to the mix, and to value my perspective as part of that mix. Conversely, I am more open to deeply listening and considering the opinions and viewpoints of other people.

I’m sure the lessons apply to all aspects of my life, not just arts writing. After all, I’m a senior citizen living in a country that values, above all, things that are new and shiny. But I know I will stay at this work until somebody offers the beach cottage and a cozy hammock.

I want my writing to resonate with a general audience, the thousands of Seattle-area residents who may never attend any ballets other than the annual Nutcracker (although I encourage them to dip a toe into works by Forsythe or Pite or the dozens of younger choreographers who are reshaping this classical art form).

The MoBBallet Dance Writers Convening: Examining the Role, Responsibility and Relevance of Dance Writing in a Changing Landscape, or Dance Camp 2.0, could have continued for another week, I think. Three days together was a good start at considering our challenges, but we still haven’t improved the situation for local journalism in general, let alone the niche of an arts writer. But I can say that each of us returned to our hometowns from the MoBB Convening with renewed commitment to advocate for the value of arts writing—and art itself–fired up by the break from daily work and the opportunity to gather with peers and artists. And, to use the parlance of my youth, we definitely raised our consciousnesses when it comes to how we write about the art that we love. But I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what evolves.