I have quite a few dialogues these days with colleagues from the dance world. While my own conception is that I will only ever be as good at writing about dance as I am at dancing - and I have been famously compared to a drunk newborn baby foal with a rhythm problem - I acknowledge that their influence is rubbing off on me and I seem to be getting "better"...
...as I hope can be proven from this recently-published review of Tereza Vejvodová’s fantastic Delimitation, which addresses pandemic alienation - in the context of more general alienations offered by capitalism - through the mechanism of an apartment search in a big city.
This article's publication follows from a week-long online workshop, part of the program Writing about Dance (in the Time of Corona), which I haven't even had time to write about but greatly appreciated. The workshop saw critics from Prague-based Taneční aktuality (Czech Dance News) and Performing Arts Hub Norway take a group through the basics of writing about dance.
It's difficult for me to read such initiatives as anything but a beacon of light in a context of critical darkness. Writing and reading critically, you notice at the moment a strange and scary - but not unexpected - trend against critical thinking. This lack of appetite can be attributed to a few different things, but it might be summarised like this: creating a work in the performing arts is hard enough at the moment already, without the 'inconveniences' of some asshole writing about your work.
This situation, in my view, makes critical writing more - and not less - important. It has been difficult for me to write through the pandemic, but what tiny fragments I have managed have emphasise the importance of productive critical reflection in avoiding disastrous outcomes. In a situation where 'discussion' becomes only an exchange of different, supposedly equally-valid opinions, criticism develops a distance from events, what Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt or distance-effect,which protects against manipulation by various ideologies.
That would clearly not be to the benefit of certain political interests, which are dominant at the moment, and which are finding the conditions of the pandemic fertile ground.
The performing arts - as a key site of creating togetherness and collectivity - is a key site of critical reflection and engagement on a collective level. Today's threats are elusive and hard to identify as they are so drowned out by exhaustive media coverage of the never-ending pandemic, but can be found anywhere from government documents to corporate directions - "engagement" "participation" and "data-driven", as profit-making 'ends' unto themselves, and not 'means' by which a meaningful culture - one that develops in the end a thinking and ethically-responsible society - might be developed.
It is time to re-claim that space.
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