Critical Correspondence

Moving Dialogue: Slices of Week One

Anna Drozdowski

“How do you live here?” Vava asked us in the roundtable discussion, and the room laughed that laugh of pride and incredulity that comes when you recognize the way you’ve forgotten how special and strange your circumstances are.  One week into our Moving Dialogue, we’ve stopped identifying the myriad of differences that separate the dance communities in Romania and NYC (space, support, history of aesthetics, audience, smoking) and begun to let the ways in which we are similar help to sew together our working time.

“I can’t come, I have to go to work.” Levi says, in response to the performance we’ll see this weekend as a group…because tips are the manner that supports his individual practice, and they are best on Saturday evenings when dance is happening. We reveal to each other who dances in clubs for money when performances can’t pay, which of us have “day jobs” that are related to the dance field and which of us have found alternate models of making space to make work.

“This was very American,” comments Cosmin and we joke further about the thin and insincere “have a good day” that is pervasive. And my knee-jerks so quickly to this funny phrase that lumps together such a diversity in a city and country that I can’t let the comment pass.  It is the stereotype, the lights & tights of Cedric Andrieux and the privileging of entertainment that leads our cultural landscape. Later when we talk about my understanding of “very European” it is one of full production support, high concept, people eschewing technique (and their clothes) onstage—equally an archetype.  And yet we all share the same space, content to let anyone lead and come to the room eager to experience our peers (both local and global) in a new way.

“It has taken us 10 years to get here,” mentions Barbara.  In the same breath she is accepting that this is the right time for the exchange to happen, and sad about the state of funding and alignment and careful consortium building that needed to happen in order to get 15 people to share the same space and time.  This is what the exchange is about, the sharing of space and time in the studio and on the street.  It is about the slightly self-conscious explanation about New Yorkers and their telephones and the Romanian capacity for conversation. And the ability to see a dance work and try to understand how you have experienced it based on your past experiences (in relief against others).

“Oh, but Alistair wouldn’t come to see this work,” I retort—an attempt to explain why DTW is within range of only certain writers and how this politics of choice is played out about who is covered, by whom and how.  Our group is wary of the term “criticism”.  We do not write about who was looking a little limp in their extension but rather how a work is evocative in its execution and ideas.  We choose the term “writer” as a political statement about what it means to be a part of a critical community rather than a distanced judgement of it.

“We have only one national dance center,” explains Corina.  This, I think to myself, is one more than we have! But we are also short on nationalism in our dance community, less willing to throw ourselves into our anthem as Gina did during our recent studio score.  It seems that every instance of haves and have-nots is complimented by a new understanding of the benefits and challenges of the system—we are learning to be appreciative of what we have by understanding what we do not.