This post aims to give students a starting point for writing about dance and other forms of art by offering guidelines and practical tips to help students when beginning a project or when finding themselves “stuck.” Accompanying the guidelines are excerpts of writings by dance critics and historians to help students “see” the guidelines in action and therefore better understand the benefits of the information in the post. Most importantly, with practice, students will become comfortable enough to modify the guidelines, tips, and activities to use when writing regardless of the assignment, subject, or discipline.

1. Be a generous and objective observer in addition to being a good audience member.
2. Describe what you see using specific examples so that your reader understands what you saw.
3. Explain cause and effect to your reader.

Keep reading for more information about these guidelines as well as practical examples and tips to help you in the course. Part II contains a specific activity to help you practice putting these guidelines into action.

Guideline #1: Be a generous and objective observer.

In other words, observe the performance before trying to make any judgments about meaning or quality. This means paying close attention to the work in front of you and withholding judgment even if the work seems disturbing or weird. Even if your assignment is to write about your personal experiences with the work itself, during the performance your attention should remain on the work of art itself as it unfolds in front of you as with dance or when looking at an an object like a photograph or sculpture.

While it makes sense if you’re unfamiliar with dance that you’d look for clues or signs during the performance so you can have the “a-ha!” moment when the dance all of a sudden makes sense to you, this can distract you from paying attention to elements of the performance including but not limited to the choreography, the relationship between the dancers’ movements and the music, and the use of the stage space.

What can also prevent you from paying close, sustained attention to a dance are some common misconceptions about art that forecloses the many reactions, experiences, or emotional responses that a work can prompt in an audience. These misconceptions include:

• The artist’s intention determines meaning; the work is meaningless unless you’re already familiar with the artist and their work.
• Art is a form of self-expression and therefore in-depth analysis is unnecessary because it’s “just” how someone feels or sees the world.
• Art has a singular meaning and all meanings are stable over time. This attitude is sometimes reflected in statements such as “The music has heavy bass and the dancers wear red so this dance suggests anger.” The logic of this statement assumes that all cultures associate the color red and bass notes with anger, which isn’t true; moreover, this statement doesn’t contain any references to the choreography or the dancers’ movements!

Myra Daleng, Director of Dance at the University of Richmond, suggests that you be an adventurous and curious audience member: “The creative critic approaches each concert with open eyes and an open mind. Do not go with preconceived ideas or compare one performance against other performances. Each person will find a different aspect of the dance that is interesting for their own personal reasons and interests.”

Central to this guideline being a good observer (not just a good audience member!) and learning to sustain your attention on something new, different, or weird. It’s strongly suggested that you read the post “Memory Makes the Best Artist” to learn some tips about developing your observation skills to improve your writing.

Guideline #2: Describe what you see using specific examples.

Guidelines #1 and #2 might be two sides of the same coin: effectively writing about dance or other forms of art requires close observation and then describing the work as accurately as possible. In this context, “specific examples” translates to “something you can point to.” Remember: specific examples are not the same thing as observations! Specific examples are chosen from observations.

Here is a passage written by art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty from her book Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (page 130) about the dance “Trio A (The Mind is Muscle, Part I)” performed here by choreographer Yvonne Rainer:

The movement is inventive — body parts seem to move out of sync, like separately functioning mechanisms — but there are no special effects kinetic or emotional. Instead, a rocking, tick-tock motion permeates the dance. Arms rotate in their sockets; feet tap out neat, rhythmic circles, a half turn to the right is tidily undone by a rotation to the left.

There are two aspects that makes this short passage effective. The first is the lack of dance jargon in favor of simple phrases that still accurately describe the Rainer’s movements: arms “rotate,” feet “tap,” and bodies “turn” to the left then to the right. The second is her third-person voice, language that keeps the reader’s attention on the dance rather than Lambert-Beatty’s opinion about it. Writing “I think the body parts seem to move out of sync” suggests that the passage is about her own opinion rather than Rainer’s choreography and movement.

Tip: Try writing your description using verbs rather than adjectives or adverbs (e.g. “arms rotate in their sockets”) as a means to write what you see.

Guideline #3: Explain cause and effect.

To demonstrate what this means, let’s consider Lambert-Beatty’s passage from above with the effects bolded and the causes underlined:

The movement is inventive — body parts seem to move out of sync, like separately functioning mechanisms — but there are no special effects kinetic or emotional. Instead, a rocking, tick-tock motion permeates the dance. Arms rotate in their sockets; feet tap out neat, rhythmic circles, a half turn to the right is tidily undone by a rotation to the left.

From The New York Times critic Alistair Macaulay’s review of the dances “Set and Reset” and “Newark” choreographed by Trisha Brown (view parts of these dances here ):

“Newark” is starker and bolder, even bleak: The wonder is that this, one of Ms. Brown’s toughest constructions, holds its audience riveted from first to last. Flat curtains of single bright colors (scarlet, mustard, maroon) by Donald Judd descend at different times, changing not only the color scheme (the dancers are in allover gray tights) but also the space, so that some dances occur in just a narrow front rectangle, while others occupy larger areas. The illusion is that the dancers never stop, and that it’s these flats and the wings that interrupt our view of a larger continuity.

Peter Zummo’s sound orchestration, devised with Mr. Judd, is the toughest element of all. Single long bursts of sound occur, like a slow conversation among a harbor siren, an alarm clock and a road drill — with equally long interstices of silence.

Ms. Brown’s choreography here consists of different threads of movement. Although the women’s dances have a little of the rippling fluency of those in “Set and Reset,” they’re contrasted with the extraordinary slow, weighted duets for men (Olsi Gjeci and Stuart Shugg). These two slowly bend, tilt, fall, lie, with the relentless, heavy fixity of machines. Their concentration and the dark grain of their motion gives “Newark” its main mood. The way the women’s somewhat faster, lighter idioms weave in and out of these dances gives “Newark” a rich musical texture.

Both Macaulay and Lambert-Beatty begin with a general impression of the dances: “the movement is inventive” (Lambert-Beatty) and “starker, bolder, even bleak” (Macaulay). Following the general statement are specific examples drawn from their observations. In other words, the specific examples by Lambert-Beatty and Macaulay serve supporting evidence for stating why one work is “inventive” and the other is “bleaker.”

Tip: use your emotional response or opinion of the work as a starting point to describing! If you leave a performance thinking “That was a weird work, I didn’t understand it at all,” then explain why. Was it because there wasn’t a story (narrative) being told? Is it because the movements and music sounded foreboding or threatening, and that made you uneasy? Trying to explain why helps you come up with specific details.

Bibliography

• How to Write About Art by Gilda Williams — Useful for most forms of writing about art, and writing in general, are Williams’ criteria that any description should answer the following questions: What is it? What does it mean? And so what, or, why is it important?
• Writing Analytically by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen — also mentioned in the post “Memory Makes the Best Artist” 
• “Guidelines for Viewing Dance and Writing Critiques for Dance Performances” by Myra Daleng, University of Richmond Writing Center — includes a very useful list of dos and don’ts along with a checklist to help edit your work; some of her guidelines may not be applicable to the types of assignments in this class. Use your best judgment!