I saw this letter from the On the Boards Managing and Artist Directors in the program last night when I went to see the Maureen Whiting Company:

Dear Friends:

A choreographer in France recently shared his current philosophy on dance; something along the lines of “dance is more a state of being than it is an end in itself.” This was a bit of revelation and very helpful in explaining the current trend in Europe that has dance makers creating performance works that are more performance art or conceptually driven than they are fueled by dance alone. Our recent presentation of John Jasperse was a good example of this. John is so self-assured about his relationship to movement that the choreography settles down into its own specific space and time, never once feeling the need to meet some general expectation of a signature movement or phrase. Perhaps this explains why John initially garnered more praise from across the Atlantic than he did here in the States. Tonight’s performance by Maureen Whiting Company also rests on this conceptual ground and we encourage you to experience the work with this context in mind.

Sometimes it seems that the expectations about what dance should be are keeping critics and audiences from getting to what dance can be. Several recent reviews by local critics of modern dance performances have seemed relatively provincial about how dance artists are working now. For several decades, many dance artists have become less interested in recognizable dance vocabulary, narrative and emotional context in hopes of freeing themselves up to explore other territories. It seems inappropriate then, as many continuing this mode of creative research, that critics would be preoccupied by conventions that were challenged and disregarded long ago. Artists working with pedestrian movement, for example, might not be to everyone’s liking but it becomes problematic when a style, choice or technique is dismissed altogether, especially when other parts of the country and Europe are highly populated with artists undertaking such investigations. What is even more problematic has been the recent tendency to compare and contrast one company to another. This always gets people in trouble, especially when it concerns artists who are unique (if not always successful) in their approaches. And this is particular limiting from a critical perspective if the only work one sees is in our own town. While Seattle has a vibrant dance scene, the organizations that present dance have different aesthetic missions. Attempting to compare work among these organizations is mostly senseless given the varying intent of the artists represented at each venue. Not taking into account what is happening in the dance world at-large is just missing an opportunity for real critique.

We encourage you to join in the conversation and discuss with us and the community the work you see. Please feel free to stop us in the lobby after a show, or write your own response to our Blog the Boards audience reviews, and continue the dialogue with your friends after you leave the theater. Each of you can add so much to the discussion.

Congratulations to Maureen Whiting and her collaborators for taking chances and trying new things.

Enjoy the show,

Sarah and Lane

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Here are my P-I reviews of the last two shows at On the Boards, shows that I gave mixed reviews. My reviews are, I believe, at least partly responsible for this defense of theirs:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/classical/208878_otb22q.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/classical/210784_otb05q.html

If I understand them correctly, they are arguing that

1.) I do not understand the nature of conceptual art,
2.) I dismiss outright forms of movement that I do not like, and
3.) It is improper to compare works of art with one another.

Let me state for the record that this is a load of crap. I am crafting a response, but would love to hear your thoughts in the interim.

Stay tuned,

Jim Demetre

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Jim Demetre

Maybe we’re too dumb to get it. Or too American, or too provincial, or too something else or not something else enough. The artists can always hope that future audiences will redeem and justify the work, but what hope is there for the bored or mystified contemporary audience?

Let me start by stating that I know zip about dance—modern or classical. Moving boldly ahead, I found Sarah and Lane’s letter hard to read.

For instance: "'dance is more a state of being than it is an end in itself.' This was a bit of revelation and very helpful in explaining the current trend in Europe that has dance makers creating performance works that are more performance art or conceptually driven than they are fueled by dance alone."

What does this mean? I didn’t know that dance was a state of being. I thought it was an action, a performance, possibly a ritual, an entertainment, an exercise, or a flirtation. But a state of being?

There is room here for speculation about the collapse of traditional boundaries of genres. In the visual arts, I find performance art maybe interesting in itself, but it violates one of the qualities of visual art that most appeals to me—its freedom from time, its lack of a beginning, middle, and end. It's probably not a big problem, more a taxonomic annoyance for me. But for the lover of dance, what does that erasure mean, the erasure of the boundary between dance and “works that are more performance art or conceptually driven than they are fueled by dance alone”? Perhaps Sarah and Lane are attempting in their letter to explain what it means. I’m not getting it, but I suspect that that’s their subject. It could be a very fertile topic for someone to write about, and I can suggest a title—“Dance Alone.”

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Victoria

I go to On The Boards because I'd rather do that on some nights than see some movie at the Meridian 16. I don't give a hoot about the high state of dance. I see cool things at the movies, at the ballet, at On The Boards, but none of it's art.

Here, at long last, is my response:

Dear Sarah and Lane,

I understand the need to defend your programming decisions against those, like myself, who have occasionally found evenings at On the Boards less than satisfying. But after reading your letter to the audience in the Maureen Whiting program Thursday night, I have some serious questions about your grasp of the art form you purport to know so much about as well as your ability to read critical reviews of the work.

Is the fortune cookie aphorism from your French choreographer supposed to represent some novel idea about the nature of art today? Perhaps you have never read Hegel, but this sentiment could have easily be taken from “Phenomenology of the Spirit” or some other 19th Century Romantic-philosophical tome.

I don’t mean to suggest that it is in any way false or wrong, but how useful is for describing what goes on at On the Boards on any given weekend? For a couple of people who dismiss local critics for their preoccupation with “conventions that were challenged or disregarded long ago,” you may wish to consider updating your own reading material.

There have been a great many developments in the theory of art since the dawn of Romantic Era: sentiments such as those of your French choreographer can sound hopelessly naïve here at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Your championing of James Jasperse on the grounds that he is “conceptually driven” is a case in point. You seem content to blindly confer mystical, shaman-like properties to his work, telling us he does not need “to meet some general expectation of a signature movement or phrase.” While you accept the vagueness as some heroic act of faith, I would argue that the work was neither “conceptual,” nor was it “driven.”

Just what concept, exactly, was he trying to explore? The more important question you should be asking yourself is what he succeeded at achieving through his “investigations” and “research.” My problem with the “vocabulary” of his movement was not that it didn’t suit me but that he didn’t have one. How is a non-verbal performer supposed to communicate with his audience without “a recognizable dance vocabulary, narrative, and emotional context?” What are these “other territories” he sets out to explore?

All good works of art, no matter how abstract or narrative, must have clarity of purpose and a compositional integrity. I think all Classicists, Romanticists, and even Post-Structuralists would agree with me on this point. Is there really anything outdated or unfashionable about so universal criteria for judgment?

Your most vexing claim in this letter, however, is that there is a “recent tendency to compare and contrast one company to another” that is “problematic” … “senseless” and “always gets people into trouble.” It is funny that I have never read anything about this in Aristotle, Samuel Johnson, John Ruskin, T.S. Eliot, or Jacques Derrida. Perhaps the dictum originates with the Assemblies of God, the Taliban, or some other group I am less acquainted with. At any rate, critics seem to employ this technique routinely. Perhaps they will be punished in the afterlife.

Comparing “Foot in Mouth” with “locust” may have been comparing apples and oranges, but what’s wrong with comparing a rotten apple with a delicious orange? They are both quantifiable human experiences, are they not?

I am happy that you end your address by encouraging your audience to engage the work, talk among itself, and respond in the blog, but it is a curious coda to an incoherent letter that sets out to explain the right and wrong way to view dance.

Jim Demetre

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Jim Demetre

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Jim Demetre

I remember this as a literary critic's response to a novelist complaining of the criticism. Could just as well be applied here, no?

First off, it is highly inappropriate to put this letter in the program, because this is basically a temper tantrum. No one likes these in public.

Now, to the specifics. In the first paragraph, the letter explains to us how we are supposed to view the piece. We're supposed to do it like they do in France. Nothing makes my eyes roll more than asking me to do something like they do in France. It suggests that Americans, with their lack of Frenchness, have no intellectual or critical capacity whatsoever. This is as annoying as being told that American English is not as correct as British English -- any American who has spent time abroad has surely come across this notion.

With our borrowed French eyes, we would see that John Jasperse is "so self-assured about his relationship to movement that the choreography settles down into its own specific space and time, never once feeling the need to meet some general expectation of a signature movement or phrase." Huh? It sounds like he was just standing still and maybe the Maureen Whiting company does, too, since it "rests on this conceptual ground" as well. Has the author ever looked at a manual of writing style?

In the second paragraph, we learn that local critics (and I suppose other people who don't like the performances) are provincial. Working in the binary world of France v. provincial, we learn that Europeans like 'artists working with pedestrian movement'. I guess in France pedestrian is a compliment. Later, the author as much as admits that the 'dance makers' efforts are unsuccessful.

About the reviews, there's a new technique on the scene and it is dangerous, it is 'a tendency to compare and contrast'. The only place I can imagine comparing and contrasting in a review being inappropriate would be North Korea. Sarah and Lane Jong-Il warn that "This always gets people in trouble..." So better watch out, Jim and all you other critics, soon, you might be sleeping with the fishes!

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I really hope this contentious situation escalates to the point where both sides can speak in a reasonably honest way about how very, very sorry the arts scene is in this godforsaken burgh. Of course, I'm just speaking as a little-known musician, but recent experiences in my line of work indicate that indeed things are getting worse. And they started out as being miserably bad.

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Thanks for spreading the discussion -- this is what it is all about.

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Jim Demetre

I will be reviewing On the Boards Northwest New Works Festival for the P-I.

Check it out and write back to us!

For more, check out their website:
http://www.ontheboards.org/index.php?id=19&nav=c2

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Jim Demetre

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Victoria

Check out my recent review of Emio Greco / PC and tell me what you think:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/classical/225174_otb21q.html

I do object, however, to poorly educated and semi-literate people who, in Seattle or elsewhere, accuse those who critique the work they present of being "provincial." There is something pathetic about a person invoking the sensibilities of "France" or even "New York" to give their questionable personal tastes authority and credibility, especially when they do this in lieu of a compelling argument. It is, in fact, what I call provincial.

If you find the French choreographer's quote profound, it is because you are a simpleton. I don't care what country you or the choreographer call home.

There is truth in what you say, however. It is sad that our US Congressmen fan the flames of xenophobia with their "Freedom Fries" cafeteria legislation and the like. It is even sadder that many Americans - the majority of whom have never travelled outside the country - cheer in response to such action. It is an insult to the French (our betters in all things culinary) and an embarrassment to all intelligent citizens of the United States.

But when you declare my critique akin to the chauvinism of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay, you are engaging in a very similar sort of behavior.

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Jim Demetre

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Jim Demetre

These things having been said (or, hi dicti, as Caesar said so many times in his 'de bello Gallico', hmm, I can't think where that took place), I still don't think Lane and Sara understand the basics of English composition and they should be called out for that. The letter, aside from being sad, was also poorly constructed and rambling. How irritating is it for Americans to have these firebrands of culture who cannot even write? So yes, you two, please bravely soldier on in the light of comments like mine no matter how boring or hackneyed the work in question might be, but revisit a manual of style here and there. Reject the run-on sentence, complete a thought, this and other tips will improve your prose and make you more credible in your attempts to de-provincialize us.

As for the French, hey, they're great! Sure the stereotype is that they tend to over-intellectualize everything, but other than that, no complaints. In fact, I kind of dig the recent vote against EU constitution -- shows a peckishness winning out over idealism and that is good fun on the world stage.

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It's really too bad that this whole post has become about the French. My point made above exactly. As for Lane not responding, I don't think he is avoiding anything. The man is obviously really busy ! Anyone working in the Arts in this city only knows how time consuming that is.

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The letter in question was so poorly written and so obsequious to presupposed sensibilities of France and New York (as opposed to Seattle's) that one can't help but snicker. For all the discussion of the importance of the work, one cannot help being sympathetic to Mr. Renege's comment about the entertainment factor. Basically, from what I have seen, On the Boreds cares little for how the audience's time in the theater is spent. If they were trying to make it pleasurable, engaging, thought-provoking, they wouldn't have to default to the 'oh, you just don't understand' thing. Alas, they don't care. This is not my fault.

So, to repeat, my criticism has nothing to with the French. It has to do with mediocrity dressed up (by Americans) in a French outfit we provincials just can't understand. If I were you, Frenchy, I'd be more annoyed at Lane and Sara by sloughing off the boring as something the French would go along with than with me for saying that this default is unacceptable.

Let's take the absurdity of the initial comments to the limit. Let's say that L&S said, 'A choreographer in Delaware recently shared his current philosophy on dance; something along the lines of “dance is more a state of being than it is an end in itself.”' It feels a lot less profound, now doesn't it?

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