Alastair Macaulay’s dance review about The Fall For Dance Festival highlights the best and worst performances of the festival. The festival itself was a mixture of great free-flowing and expressive dancers accompanied by evocative musicians. Macaulay focuses on three performances and describes the strongest parts.
I really enjoyed his descriptions of the dancer Lil Buck. In short, he is fluid. Macaulay describes Lil Buck’s dance as “dazzling ripples along his arms and through his shoulders” and these words strike me. When I read these words over again Macaulay successfully paints the image/performance in my head – and that is what makes this a convincing review. Also Macaulay incorporates YouTube links in his reviews to make it much more interactive.
Yet, even though the review itself is great at displaying these images. I cannot comprehend how Macaulay derives these conclusions from what he saw. I feel that dance reviews are not exactly the most useful type of art review for everyone. Dance is interesting – but a dance review is just a heap of metaphors and adjectives. I guess that after reading so many theater reviews, I feel that these dance reviews are lackluster. I hope that I can see what Macaulay is seeing when we watch it on Wednesday.
Packed with powerful words and images, but nothing enticing.
I disagree with you that dance reviews are ‘lackluster’ or ‘not enticing.’ In my opinion the words they use create images in your mind that allow you to shape what the dance is in your head. I find that enticing to readers because then you would want to see the dance for yourself and can determine for yourself whether the dance is good or not.
Lucky for us we can do just that since we’re seeing this dance on Wednesday!
I totally agree with you. Dance reviews are somewhat useless because everyone has their own unique way of interpreting art, especially dance. What one reviewer might see, might not be what everyone else sees.
I agree with Sharon. I think that reviews for the different forms of art need to be different themselves in order to suit the works they are about. I also think it can feel strange to focus on the reviews of one form of art, such as theater, then read a review of another form because they are so different.
At the beginning of the semester I also picked one of Alastair Macaulays reviews to critque upon. While I found him/her? to be extremely descriptive, I was unsure of the direction he was leading me in terms of positive or negative feedback about the dance as a whole. After reading your post, I feel that his style is to point out weak areas of the performance and then polish up the review with strong descriptive parts of the production. However I feel that although positive and descriptive, they are too opinionated and personal. Like you said, it should be subjective to individual taste.
I’ll have to disagree with the “not enticing” part because you can tell the opinions and views through a critic’s language. Like when you quoted “dazzling ripples along his arms and through his shoulder” the word dazzling gives an impression that the critic is quite intrigued. The thing with dance is that it’s something you see, not something you watch, like movies.