When Is Your Dance Wrong?
Criticism and critique are based on personal standards and opinion. Opinion is fine, of course. However, when you apply your standard to others, at best, you should arrive at “like” and “don’t like” rather than “wrong” or “right.” Someone’s impression or perception of a subject reinterpreted through their art can be appreciated, unappreciated, liked or disliked, but can’t be wrong.
Finding an Anchor with a Mentor
A mentor can also help you be less reactive and more strategic in planning how you need to move forward and not be coerced continuously by what seems best, but may not be best for you and your company’s mission.
Being a Mentor: Expanding the Reach of the Art Form
Finally, I wish someone had explained to me that it is always, especially initially, more difficult for artists to stay true to their individual creative visions than to adopt a herd mentality and be a member of an artistic clique.
Chicago Dance Luminaries Talk Dance/USA
Prominent members of Chicago’s dance scene are excited about Dance/USA‘s national conference (more here) coming in July! What does it mean for Chicago to be hosting the national conference this summer?
‘Dancers’ Bodies, Promoting Wellness’: 3 Takeaways
We cannot change the need for relative thinness in this visual art form. But we can find better ways to communicate with the dancers, always aware of their vulnerability and always recognizing them as talented young people rather than body types.
Seven Questions for Pico Iyer: Dance Is a Home … and a Sanctuary
It may be running every morning, or doing yoga or tai-chi, or in fact dancing; but without this anchoring discipline and exercise, we’ll be lost in a wilderness of flashing bytes.
Seven Questions for Pico Iyer: Globalism of the Heart, the Imagination, and the Conscience
Watch the kids of Osaka dance salsa (as they love to do), listen to Norah Jones or see how the girls of Beijing are dancing Swan Lake, and you see people literally going places they haven’t gone before.
Seven Questions for Pico Iyer: Dance as a Window on a Very Foreign Culture
To study dance today is to gain a window on a very foreign culture often (when I was growing up in England, all we could learn was the foxtrot or the polka). And this itself moves children to think of home in a much larger, perhaps more invisible way
Seven Questions for Pico Iyer: Cutting Through the Screen of Words
Dance, official or otherwise, is the way we cut through the screen of words and even ideas, at times, and speak in a way as urgent as tears, and as hard to turn away from.
What Should a Dance Critic Talk About When She Talks About Dance?
What is the role of a dance critic? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a couple of weeks now, ever since reading an article on the front page of The Washington Post’s Style section in mid-October. The piece, by the paper’s chief dance critic, Sarah Kaufman, confirmed a hunch I’ve had for a while: Kaufman is making an occupation of not writing about modern dance.