Shaping Dance Canons: The critic effect
By Kaija Pepper
Dance criticism can be many things: a celebration, a documentation, an examination, an evaluation, boring, fun to read, biased, generous, too much like PR, with too much description, with too little description … the possibilities and pitfalls are endless. In Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity, recently published by the University Press of Florida, Kate Mattingly zooms in on its shortcomings in diversity and equity, and how that impacts the art form, focusing on the United States, the territory in which her book is set.
She aims to show how, through what they choose to write and how they write it, critics can be instrumental in shaping the way the public sees and talks about dance. Critics, she says, can also influence what and who the public even gets to see.
Readers are asked to imagine dance criticism in a very particular way, as an “apparatus that supports and provides context for some artists, and determines which artists are held, valued, and documented.” The book begins by looking at how the apparatus has been used by John Martin, well known as a champion of American modern dance in its early days, who began writing for the New York Times in 1927. Mattingly says: “Regarded as a spokesperson for certain choreographers, Martin coined the label ‘modern dance’ and offered readers methods for viewing this approach to choreography and performance.” She goes on to nail Martin’s writing for its “racialized assumptions about artists of color” and dismissal of non-white cultural influences.
Some arguments are a little disingenuous. When Martin is criticized for his use in 1940 of “the infantilizing term ‘girls’” to describe Black women dancers in their thirties, there is no historical context explaining that the word girls (and boys) was commonly used to describe white dancers, too, an issue even in more recent decades. What I appreciated, though, was the broader discussion of the article from which the quote comes: that is, Martin’s dismissive review of the “Negro Unit” of American Ballet Theatre. Mattingly compares his coverage with that of Dan Burley, an African American critic for the New York Amsterdam News, for whom the performance was a significant one. But it is the white American critic, writing for the hugely popular New York Times, who wielded the most power. After that one production — a ballet by Agnes de Mille performed three times — the unit folded.
In the final chapter, Mattingly makes a pitch for the relevance of digital platforms, where “dance criticism not only documents, contextualizes, and describes but also organizes, nurtures, and promotes creative work…” Her first example is the Philadelphia-based website, thINKing DANCE, where there is the lightning-speed possibility for readers to respond via the comments section. However, looking through several posts, it seems readers seldom do offer comments or take advantage of the site’s actual Letters to the Editor section. I share this information not to downplay the value of thINKing DANCE, a lively and valuable site, but to indicate that digital publishing has as many challenges engaging readers — and funding operations and nurturing writers — as print.
Discussing another digital platform, On the Boards TV in Seattle, Mattingly explains that having artists work closely with a professional film company on how their live event is recorded and edited creates a valuable “kinesthetic impression.” Such films are a way of “replacing the critic who described or documented, and by extension controlled, the circulation of [the artist’s] performance.” This artist-controlled coverage is certainly valuable, but it could equally be seen as another piece of the publicity machine.
Although Mattingly, who has past experience writing about dance for several American publications, knows her way around a sentence, at times ideas — and jargon — are packed in rather tightly: her PhD in Performance Studies shows. She is currently an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia.
While I found Shaping Dance Canons unsympathetic to the challenges faced by dance writers pursuing their calling today, Mattingly says her intentions are not “to demonize or villainize dance critics but rather [to] expose the interdependence of value systems and criticism.” Her account of how the act of criticism is reconfigured to uphold different aesthetic goals (after Martin, there’s an interesting chapter on avant-garde artist-writer Yvonne Rainer) is well worth pondering.
Tags: books on dance dance criticism diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) John Martin Kate Mattingly