Afterthoughts

Thinking about what to say to Ann's students, I kept coming back to Mark Lawson's piece about Edward Scissorhands last Christmas. He began:

Matthew Bourne, the leading evangelist for populist choreography, raises the question of whether he has made modern dance marketable by taking out the dance. Non-aficionados have two main problems with ballet. The first is the difficulty of understanding the narrative of what is, since the end of silent cinema and the demise of mime as a mainstream entertainment, the only non-verbal form of performance. Related to this is the difficulty of appreciating what the performers’ feet are doing. You don’t have to be an expert in theatre or music to sense when someone is singing or speaking impressively but, unless a dancer actually falls over or achieves a move of extreme gymnastic virtuosity, civilians struggle to tell if they are dancing badly or well.

I believe that Mark expresses an incomprehension that's broadly shared in the UK's cultural establishment. In her blog, Apollinaire Scherr broaches the same issue from another angle:

In my experience, editors want good writing if they can get it, though sometimes they aren't exactly sure what "good" would be, because they feel out of their league with dance and they've seen so few positive examples.

I believe that dance writing has more explicitly to address readers who would not normally come to a dance performance. It has to be as compelling as the best literary or fine arts criticism. With the exception of Clement Crisp in this generation, I wonder if there is a single dance writer whose prose, a 'civilian', in Lawson's phrase, would pause to read. Crisp, his judgement aside, has a very clear sense of his readers: senior managers who might bring their clients to the Opera House for a good night out, and who do not want to be embarrassed by bringing them to something that's downright bad. Newspaper arts writing is not higher criticism - in many ways it's just another branch of consumer journalism. The craft of it subsists in fusing together critical judgement, good writing and a populist sense.

Unless we get a new generation of writers who can communicate dance in this way, newspaper coverage will vanish from sight. If the only way then to find dance writing is to Google it, the consequences for the art form will be profound.

There are of course other reasons why dance writing might be eclipsed. Very few of the students I met read a newspaper. They are typical of their generation - and there is plenty of evidence that they may never start (one reason why papers like The Guardian and The Telegraph are investing so heavily in the web). But try finding your way through the labyrinth of either of these sites to the dance writing there - the search would have to be very purposeful.....