I’m sure I’ll have much more to say on this over time, so I labeled the post Part One.
Here are a couple of write-ups from The Dance Enthusiast on the panel discussion on dance criticism two weeks ago that I took part in.
I was going to wait for the video to go up online so I could embed that or link to it but it hasn’t gone up yet. I usually take notes at such things, but since I was on the panel didn’t — and I feel lost doing a write-up without my notes.
Anyway, these two write-ups are good. We talked about how there are virtually no paying jobs for dance writers now, in the internet age, how there’s only one full-time dance critic in the country (no one was allowed to speak his name — but it’s Alastair Macaulay of the NY Times of course), and the situation is only getting more dire as newspapers let go more and more of their arts critics and close down entire arts sections.
Robert Johnson, esteemed longtime dance critic, currently at the New Jersey Star Ledger but he’s written and / or edited for practically every dance publication in existence (Dance Magazine, Pointe, etc.) was on the panel as well, and he was probably the person most knowledgeable about dance history and the history of writing about dance of anyone in the room. He’s a very nice man as well and I was glad to finally meet him. As Jowers points out in her write-up, when Marc Kirshner of TenduTV (the moderator) asked how newspapers got into this situation, Johnson pointed to an intriguing-looking book by Dolores Hayden and said it likely has a great deal to do with the suburbanization of American culture. Newspapers are local and most of them serve their urban communities, and with people leaving those urban centers and spreading out, there’s just not as much interest in what goes on in the cities anymore — like dance and classical music performances, art openings, etc.
That definitely resonated with me since many of my readers here found my blog through my writing on the dance TV shows and aren’t located anywhere near New York. I’ve tried to write about the local dance performances I see in a way that makes those people interested in seeing a performance,