Critical Correspondence

MRPJ#9/Body of Language/Figure of Speech: Extras

The obsession with categories a priori is not a bad thing in itself. It can be an informative and educational way of understanding artists’ points of departure, and it avoids placing someone within the wrong judgmental brackets. To apply a set of philosophical/ideological beliefs that fit a specific historical period to works created in a radically different environment, informed by a more diverse array of voices and rooted in a more complex historical landscape, is a futile analytical exercise because it does not serve either the artist, the audience, or the work, with its rightful context.

However emphasizing categories over what is actually happening on stage presents its own set of problems. The disappointment expressed in some of the dance writings I have come across lately exposes the gap between what artists are creating today and the nostalgia of many critics and dance scholars for an earlier time, and easier categories. –from “The War at Home” by Patricia Hoffbauer

Persons watching from the outside? Time to see what is going on. Push into the periphery of your hands and feet and explore the shifting space around you. Fingers…toes…extend until you don’t know what might happen next—falling out of the internal into another place. Somewhere there is a place to enter and exit from. You can move. Find a space where you don’t know the language. Consider the qualities that may come your way! — from “SUDDENLY SHE JUMPED UP (she said)” by Gwen Welliver