Strictly Mark and Karen

I'll be cheering for Mark and Karen in tonights' final. And even more for Karen than for Mark. There's a driven quality about both Karen and Lilia to which I strongly relate. Make no mistake about it; this is a contest between the two professsionals and Mark and Matt are along for the ride. Suzie and I will be a little bereft when it's all over. Not only have we watched every SCD, but we've videoed every Strictly Take Two on BBC2 and watched it late at night. Now that it will soon be over, we might as well stow the TV set away for another year (I chose the image with this post, because I thought Mark and Karen's samba was the dance of the series.)

I was fascinated by Martin Kettle's op-ed piece in today's Guardian. The normal stuff of his column is politics and economics. Today he celebrates dance. The peg is Strictly Come Dancing, but he raises some intriguing questions which deserve discussion (but I've had several glasses of champagne already this lunchtime, so reasoned analysis can wait). Here's a flavour.

"With a few exceptions, the movers and shakers of the cultural world share this blind spot. Intellectuals like to obsess about the visual arts, the theatre, opera and music. Dance, in such company, counts for relatively little. Incredibly, there are almost no serious books about dance. Dance has no Simon Schama, no Bryan Magee, no Harold Bloom. Maybe intellectuals don't dance. I suspect the simpler truth is that the men who dominate the western cultural establishment look down on a performance art in which women compete on equal terms and which is particularly attractive to women."

He's uninformed about dance scholarship, but on the button about the absence of dance intellectuals who can credibly communicate the form to the wider culture. Who've we got? In the UK, four names come to mind: Stephanie Jordan, Richard Ralph, Millicent Hodson and Alastair Macaulay - each has intellectual heft, but their scholarly concerns are specific. None of the four is, as far as I know, strongly engaged by a wider socio-political agenda - their energies are very directed towards theatre and dance.

Dance will not prosper in this country until we again have leader figures who are wise in the ways of the political system, and passionately exercised by the concerns of society at large. De Valois knew precisely what buttons to press to get her way, while we can categorise Ashton as an establishment figure, a political conservative, who had leverage with some immensely influential people - and who knew of life outside the theatre. Similarly MacMillan - a political radical, a dance equivalent of literature's Angry Young Men. Constant Lambert was active in left-wing politics, a vigorous polemicist in the journals of his day.

And dance will not prosper, here - or anywhere - until writers who care about the form, also care about communicating it to the non-cognoscenti, to Mark Lawson's 'civilians'. Too much of what we write (I included) can only mean anything to a vanishingly small percentage of our potential readers.

Jonathan Still in a Ballet.co posting once referred playfully to the 'balletgentsia'. However, there is a vacancy for the position of dance's 'public intellectual'.