History/theory – criticism/practice

Abstract

This essay is deeply indebted to Christine Dakin who danced Dark Meadow in a 1993 revival and thus in a sense put it before me as an important work to consider. In the 1980s, I had the privilege of working with Christine in my company and I was following her performances with the Martha Graham Dance Company as she redefined key roles in the repertory from Appalachian Spring to Cave of the Heart and Rite of Spring. My attempt at analysis was as dependent on an actual performance in 1993 as had been John Martin’s initial criticism at the premiere in 1946. In a sense, this essay led ultimately to the Graham book (2012). Here is also the theme of the discursive moment within or alongside the kinetic moment – in sum, the idea that once dance is performed it inevitably circulates in discourse, and hence, once viewed in public, becomes a discursive formation (see also Chapter 3). The problem within modernism of the call to interpret (the critic before the work) highlighted this situation and led me into a sort of subgenre: the criticism of criticism, and the necessity for criticism to theorize. The essay takes criticism seriously enough to demand of it a theory of interpretation. There is perhaps also the suggestion of a related if different question to that posed by Chapter 8: how can we inhabit a dance? Here, as in Chapter 1, the question of dance and writing is also foregrounded not only with respect to criticism but also in the light of the influential protocols of phenomenology in thinking about dance. These were opened to critical reflection in the case of John Martin. It seemed to me here that the challenge of phenomenology to re-language had yet to be truly taken up. This led much later to the special issue of Dance Research Journal 43/2 (Winter 2011): “Dance and Phenomenology: Critical Reappraisals.” One more comment: the positioning of Dark Meadow as an abjuration of the theatricality of the 1940s and a return to the “embodiment” aesthetic of the 1930s has since been worked through as a historical phenomenon in Gay Morris’s A Game for Dancers.