When you are watching a dance performance, there is no research to be done and there are no special methods or, tricks to be studied before you sit in your seat. The big secret that dance lovers have discovered is that there's no secret at all. It's your experience, and the interpretation of it is all yours.
~ Arts Alive, on appreciating dance
Not infrequently someone will say to me after a reading, I didn't understand your poems but I liked them. And I say, if you liked them you understood them—you don't have to translate or critique them.
I happened to go to Alvin Ailey yesterday; the program was some greatest hits: Night Creature (1974), Cry (1971), Revelations (1960), plus a piece called Members Don't Get Weary (2017), choreographed by Jamar Roberts. I liked it all—the athleticism! the polish!—& tried not to overthink what I was seeing, especially given that I have no way to judge dance—this was, to my best recollection, only the third time I've seen dance in my life (Paul Taylor, Meredith Monk).
I ended up liking the most abstract dance the best, Members Don't Get Weary, maybe the way modern poets reject narrative for pure language.
I do have questions: Is dance considered a collaboration, given that it starts with others' music? Is this how people come to contemporary poetry? "I can tell they are good at what they do, but why are they doing it?"
And since I doubt I'll ever write about dance again, here are three more quotes:
How can we know the dancer from the dance? - William Butler Yeats
There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good. - Edwin Denby
Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order. - Samuel Beckett
~ Arts Alive, on appreciating dance
Not infrequently someone will say to me after a reading, I didn't understand your poems but I liked them. And I say, if you liked them you understood them—you don't have to translate or critique them.
I happened to go to Alvin Ailey yesterday; the program was some greatest hits: Night Creature (1974), Cry (1971), Revelations (1960), plus a piece called Members Don't Get Weary (2017), choreographed by Jamar Roberts. I liked it all—the athleticism! the polish!—& tried not to overthink what I was seeing, especially given that I have no way to judge dance—this was, to my best recollection, only the third time I've seen dance in my life (Paul Taylor, Meredith Monk).
I ended up liking the most abstract dance the best, Members Don't Get Weary, maybe the way modern poets reject narrative for pure language.
I do have questions: Is dance considered a collaboration, given that it starts with others' music? Is this how people come to contemporary poetry? "I can tell they are good at what they do, but why are they doing it?"
And since I doubt I'll ever write about dance again, here are three more quotes:
How can we know the dancer from the dance? - William Butler Yeats
There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good. - Edwin Denby
Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order. - Samuel Beckett