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.
