the urgent artist

Hi Verite,
With all due respect and as a proud member of NYC’s downtown dance community, I think this IS one of the more interesting and important wars to be fighting right now. I take issue with Alastair for a number of reasons, but tiffs over wording are low on my list of reasons why I feel compelled to call him out for doing continual disservice to a form and community of which he’s an integral part. I raise what I see to be fundamental issues with his agenda and ideology because I believe that what he is doing is harmful to the work of myself, my colleagues, our audiences, and the broader world outside the dance community.

While I staunchly disagree with you and Alastair that dance must be ephemeral (I’ve written a few posts here about my company’s Anti-Ephemeralism, feel free to take a look and discuss!), that’s simply not what I’m taking issue with here.

Whether or not you believe that anything has the power to sustain, capture, or provide record of a dance once it’s been performed, the writings of dance critics and reviewers are some of the most accessible, influential, and long-lasting instances in which a work is able to exist past its performance. For Alastair, the head dance critic of the New York Times, to imply that dance is “the art with no history” not only does a disservice to his own form of writing as an important part of the dance ecosystem, but to the experiences, work, and dedication of everyone else involved. What good does it do for anyone in the community to brush off our rich history? The history is there – ask the choreographers for their notebooks filled with ideas and receipts from rehearsal space they booked, ask the audience to talk about the piece they saw and what they remember, and look online for old reviews of the work. To suggest that anything is without a history is to open the possibility that it doesn’t, or wasn’t important enough, to truly exist in a meaningful way.

I do partially agree with what you’re saying – live performance is a thing all onto its own and is extremely difficult (if impossible) to reproduce. However, it would mean one thing to me if he was admitting that his writing could not fully capturing the experience, but trying to describe what was important about this past decade and look at some of the notable innovations and explorations, etc. If he was doing that, i might feel, as you put it, that he was concerned with the form’s “Preservation, Continuation and Survival”. However, he goes on, in the very same article, to completely dismiss the post-modern community and their contributions to the decade by glossing over their work completely without differentiation, knowledge, or respect, saying that the community is “a field too large for anyone to keep complete track of” and that “too little of late has amounted to anything historic.”

I do not doubt that Alastair holds an amazing amount of experiential knowledge as a viewer of dance. However, it has become clear time and time again the the standards and tools that he uses to examine post modern dance are not correct or helpful ways in which to view the work that is being made. If his goal here is a challenge to choreographers to make their work more impactful, more memorable, and therefore “catch the audience at the moments they sit in those velvet covered seats” then why not give a few examples of moments that were able to accomplish that this decade, or artists who provide that experience on a continual basis? Statements such as these make me doubt Alastair’s understanding of the community’s work, as well as the works undeniable influence on other parts of the dance world.

If Alastair truly cannot see these things in the post modern community and understand the ideas being considered and art being made (and truly feels, as he expresses in this article, that it’s not important enough to bother with), then he owes it to the community to step away from it, deciding once and for all to truly not bother with it, and leave it to other critics and writers. If he can indeed see these moments of worth, then he owes it to the community to give them the same respect that he reserves for other genres of dance, though postmodernism may never be his cup of tea. By dismissing postmodernism time and time again, be it because of his own taste or his lack of understanding about what the form is trying to achieve, he does a disservice to not only the artists, but the current and potential audiences trying to understand more about the form.

I do not propose that Alastair is dumb, or that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He may even, as you said, have one of the most thorough understandings of dance history of anyone alive today. But he will eventually pass on, and if he continues to be insistent that dance has no history, be it through discounting the written artifacts that the form (and he himself!) leaves behind, or through not stepping away from what he fails to understand, we then truly be a community with a lost history.

All I ask is that he begin to do his job, not as someone who only likes certain kinds of dance, and not as someone who judges one type of dance with the critiques of another, but as a critic and historian who has a holistic understanding of the community and form as a whole. Or, if he can or will not, let him step aside and let someone else do the job.

I don’t feel that what I’m doing is nitpicking or making poor choice of which wars to fight – I’m standing up for my art form, my community, and our history.