Writing about the dancer when we are reviewing the choreography is another problem. How do you see the dancer’s and the choreographer’s work at the same time? Perhaps we can practice double-vision; perhaps we ought to attend rehearsal. The solution for me at the moment is to alternate focus, mix in coverage of dancers with coverage of choreographers and choreographic work. We have quite a debt of coverage to pay. Most anthologies of dance writing contain sections on major choreographers; few contain sections on dancers — even in the narrative sense of tracing a dancer’s training or experience! When you consider that the audience invests its primary experience in the dancer, this gap becomes a travesty.

The question of what this art costs — what it takes to build a sensibility that interests contemporary choreographers and audiences — is another matter. This time often privileges certain sensibilities for ballet dancers (wounded, girlish, virginal, doomed, generous). I don’t think these are always the healthiest ones, and I certainly don’t think they’re the only possible ones. Imagine if we had demanded that all poets be confessional poets with intense inner dramas to confess. Building an appreciation for the other possible sensibilities is one of the critic’s tasks — battling our general bias against seeing intellect and active art in dancers so that dancers may build other sensibilities and render them visible.

People in class are statues or particular kinds of trees.

Watching M — she’s instantaneous, she takes place at all times. Next to her, a good dancer — proficient, musical — looks brittle, and afraid. M likes change. Or perhaps she doesn’t like herself. The timbre of her change itself shifts from moment to moment.

Nothing that is does not happen to her. She reveals the room’s weather, local variations in pressure passing across her form.

Someone else is a bouquet of flowers, gladiolas and gardenias, unwieldy. Sweet for a moment and then like a fallen soufflé.

Back to M. She looks as if she might break any moment in a gold splintering, a silver sprain. She looks like she’s not sure how much longer she’ll be here. Prevailing wind — a quick persuasion — she erects, quickly condemns a center, abandons it, her neck stretching forward to the future.