Let’s talk about dancers. It’s not as easy as you might think.

A is small in her motions, pretty in her gestures, light in leaps in spite of a less-than-slim frame. When she’s still, nothing happens; you don’t look at her, she doesn’t seem promising. In fact, she even seems a little petulant, irritated that you’re not looking. Yet when she moves, she gives up the spoiled little-girl pose. Or she doesn’t give it up; she escapes from it and from herself in fast footwork, in the sudden elevation of a jump. Meanwhile, the curled-tendril tracings of her hands and head enact her little fears, her little desires.

It’s difficult not to think of, more difficult not to write of all this as evidence of her psyche. She must be wounded. She’s a James character. She has this one way, this gift for beauty, to redeem herself from her petty life… offstage, you wouldn’t want to know her.

I’m exaggerating, but only a little. For example:

Admittedly, this example comes from a Russian critic of the last century, but it’s common even in today’s dance writing to speak of a dancer’s innocence, passion, and spirit without acknowledging the dangerous assumption we’re making. I’ll call this longstanding habit of dance the “psychological fallacy” — everything we see is the dancer’s own soul, usually laid bare by the skill of the choreographer, which allows her to become what she really is. Whether a dancer has anything compelling to embody is not a matter she can do anything about.

Another dancer: K is tall, with long legs and arms and a tiny torso. Her feet look like modeling clay; she keeps going right over what would be anyone else’s maximum arch, spinning on a bent bow. Every joint in her body hyperextends so that she’s voluptuously curvy in spite of being impeccably thin, and every curvilinear move extends miles into space.

A body like this tempts critics to write about the dancer as if she were a thoroughbred horse. What’s assessed is the quality of the dancer’s frame, taken as if it were an absolute. The dancer either has or does not have exquisite feet. Her flexibility is innate, independent of training and usage. And there’s an envious implication hidden in criticism of this sort: in that body, anybody could dance, the critic seems to say. If, with that body, the dancer fails to live up to expectations, it’s because she’s lazy, or worse: crossing this physical fallacy with the psychological fallacy, we could claim (as some critics don’t hesitate to) that, sadly, this glorious machine is wasted on a vulgar girl.

Both the physical and psychological fallacies deny the dancer any art. The genius of her performance comes from her body or her soul; there’s no room for her to be an agent in her own dance. The physical fallacy does make room for her skills, but technique alone does not make a dance artist, any more than the ability to draw a horse makes a visual artist.

Another mode of criticism borrows the language of classical music criticism. We hear about the “handling” of phrases, about rubato and interpretation. This mode allows her art, but denies her embodiment. The dancer is envisioned as manipulating her performance; there’s no sense that she lives there, too.

The problem is clear: altogether, current modes of describing dancers stop short of achieving a verbal record of an embodied art. I’m not casting blame; I do it too.

To me as a dance critic, it matters because the critic’s job is to pay attention and to offer readers ways of paying attention. Without a language for the dancer’s achievement, I’m not doing my job. It also matters to me because plenty of otherwise cultured people feel no shame in ignoring dance — and they feel this way, I think, because they’ve been led by popular discourse to see dance as purely physical, nothing to do with the sort of art they practice or follow.

Finally, it matters because if we can get closer to the dancer’s art, we will learn more about all art. Particularly, we will learn something that has been hidden.

Let’s stick to ballet dancers. (Specifically, female ballet dancers. Male ballet dancers have their own ghetto; this is an issue for another essay.) Modern dancers so often share choreographic credit; also, their less strict technique often frees them from the physical fallacy. But in the repertory art of ballet dancers, we see the clearest version of our problem. To make this even more difficult, I’m going to stick to ballet dancers in technique class (not in performance). If I can locate the art here, I’ll be getting somewhere.

You’d never single D out on the street; she has a pretty, built-up, nearly Victorian figure, not the slim sliding planes of the Balanchine baby. When she dances, she casts a little halo all around herself; she is a tight nucleus of rightness, of nearly puritanical correctness. She does nothing in an extraordinary way; she is not infinitely pliable, nor does she try to be. Instead of oscillating between abandon and fear, like many dancers, she is under control at all times. She audits herself. The leg must be turned out, the fifth position must be reached before the next step, the arms must remain symmetrical even in preparation for a leap (which will not be ecstatic). She looks as if she’s tracing outlines of ideal forms in the air; she dances like a believer — but more a Methodist than a Pentecostal. D redeems herself from primness and zealotry, most of the time, by her unmistakable rectitude — she’s no hypocrite — and by a whimsical weakness in her timing.

I don’t know about this description. The psychological creeps in… There is a paucity of language for describing movement quality. It’s like trying to describe smells. It pushes at the edge.

Just now, some of you are beating your heads on the table, muttering “Forsythe! Forsythe!” How right you are! William Forsythe has been digging in the mines of embodied thought for years, with good results:

And:

He has the ideas I’m after, more or less — the possible thoughts that might emerge for a physical actor in space, the sense of dancers moving within, having a relation with, a technique. But Forsythe, in so far as he strives to render his ideas in words, is concerned with establishing dance’s intellectual credibility to an audience of scholars and theorists. He uses words like “technologies” and “methodologies”… This was and is a necessary project, but it’s not mine.

Likewise, I know the theorists have been here before me, undoing the split of body and mind. More and more, the thinking we need now is choreographic, architectural: it considers the movement of multiple objects, equal and unequal, through a space that is itself a factor in their movement. Language to describe this thinking exists. But a vernacular does not. We have the framework; we lack the flesh. I want to vivify embodied thought for the lay audience — to come up with ways of writing that evoke the wet look, the insistent flesh of dance.

K, with her flexile frame, indicates the dimensions of the space she stands in. She illuminates the possible not merely through doing — doing is flat in comparison with the rush of symmetries and perspectives she passes sedately through in promenade (a slow revolving balance on one foot). She is the opposite of a rhythmic gymnast.

K reduces technique to a series of Xs that ripple through her body, cross-body oppositions, this shoulder-that foot, creating a lateral web through which she occasionally plunges. But only occasionally. K’s main flaw (and it’s an interesting one) is an absence of engagement. She looks perpetually dreamy, despite the rigorous action of her body — a sleepwalker. In her laziness runs an undercurrent of bemusement: in croisé arabesque (at an angle to the viewer, with far leg lifted) the X’s curl, the toes of her lifted foot launching an arc that lightly lands at the slight backward tilt of her head. Little bits of her flutter and tremble: her foot in arabesque, her pointy shoulderblades. Her leg in second (to the side) flies up somewhere, unsecured, unlocated. It’s hard to find her in the rules. If D dances like a believer, K dances like an apostate. Her limbs illustrate limbo, the tracklessness of space. She might be playing a joke on ballet.

This type of description that I’m practicing doesn’t preclude comments on skill, body, or musical know-how. All that is valuable, so long as it’s unified by the apprehension of a moving artist. This type of description also doesn’t preclude criticism.

M has a gymnastic body: flat torso, narrow hips, deep thighs. If she sways, she sways forward in her spine, not side to side in her hips like most women. The place where her thighs join her pelvis shows the serious architecture of a suspension bridge — cables, bolts, anchors. And there is an architectural look about her: her arabesque suggests a rampart or a flying buttress. It looks permanent when she steps into it, though she’ll abandon it a moment later. Her grand battement in second (high kick to the side) flies out like a compass, and even when her leg nearly reaches her ear, her kick remains fierce, her foot clawing.

Watching them, we are aware, sometimes poignantly, of the fragility of humans, the weakness of our attempts to transcend.

M’s tremendous strength changes her relationship to gravity. Most exhale downward, collapsing toward the floor on impact. Watching them, we are aware, sometimes poignantly, of the fragility of humans, the weakness of our attempts to transcend. But M creates her own solar system. Her arms never cave in toward her ribs; they have their own orbit. Sometimes she jumps again out of the air.

(I’m not succeeding; in all this, I’ve lost her art.)

Other dancers in the room — one announces “dead again” each time her feet close in fifth position. Another is emotionally engaged in the music, but her dancing doesn’t reach to her extremities; the feet are an approximation. “I’ll just put it here,” one says, casting up an arbitrary leg. “Can I fake this?” another asks, hanging back in her hips.

N is M’s opposite — delicate, girlish. Instead of M’s rigorous internal system, N gives us an elaborate demonstration of disconnection, non-physics. How her foot turns out at that angle in fifth I can’t tell, since it flops back to a more normal shape as soon as she lifts it from the floor. N is attached to the mirror; she needs to see herself in a shape to know that it’s happened. This slows her down. In contrast, M happens: she rapidly builds and demolishes her positions. Even if we like them, they’re not what she’s after. Is she seeking platonic solids?

K’s ethereal looks, her spectacular body, would be enough for most dancers and nearly enough for most audiences. M’s strength is the same. But M doesn’t rest in it, doesn’t retreat behind it. In fact, she doesn’t even drive it toward the conventional goal; her technique’s not rock-solid. She tends to swing around steps at the barre, over, under, her knees (a weak spot) joggling. She doesn’t use strength to shore herself up; impatiently, she flings it forward. Her body never says “done.”

All this makes M a modern dancer. You empathize with her at once, you put yourself in her place. She is a best version of ourselves: strong but vulnerable, always moving forward, beautiful without a trace of music-box prettiness.

Not really. I never met a dancer who didn’t resemble her dancing. I don’t think a dancer says to herself, I’ll be impulsive tonight, and then wrenches that out of nowhere. But then I don’t think writers (or any other artists — but I know writers best) do that either. Do you know any writers who don’t resemble their writing?

Do you know any writers who don’t resemble their writing? And if we admit — how do you do what you do? Do you conceive it and then execute it, pushing that genius thought through the engine of your skill?

And if we admit — how do you do what you do? Do you conceive it and then execute it, pushing that genius thought through the engine of your skill? Or is it a matter of our habits of reading, our ways of looking, our banal, poky tasks (seeking a word that means violent but has an “s” sound), one on top of another, layered and layered? We practice and feed a sensibility; suddenly it meets a circumstance, it seizes a chance.

No wonder we’ve covered up the art of the repertory dancer: her work reveals the limits of genius and the beginning of — what? The un-united atmospheric forces — which are not genius, not innate (not that easy!), but worked slowly into being.

S doesn’t like the idea of me writing about dancers in class, because in class she’s “in my underwear.” Class is nothing like performing for her. Still, I ask, aren’t you practicing something in class that goes beyond technique? She explains that class is a necessary evil for her. To stay in shape to perform only occasionally, she has to take class five or six days a week, year-round. And she’s been doing this for years, decades. She is bored with it — or she would be, if she didn’t play mind games with herself. What mind-games? She pretends that she is a scientist, she pretends someone is watching. “I pretend it’s the last day of my life.” She needs to find a way to love each step, she says, even if she doesn’t like it.

She thinks of these exercises as coping techniques. But all that imaginative play surfaces in her performance. S, the leading ballerina of Minneapolis, always looks alive when she dances — as if her life is ongoing, right there, in that moment. In class, she practices that aliveness, that engagement.

So what I’m trying to talk about is the dancer’s relationship with time, the space she dances in, her own body, its talents or injuries, the mirror, technique, specific elements of technique, isolation, company, space itself, risk, failure, success, etc.

In good dancers, these are interesting relationships; building these relationships is the hidden art of the dancer. (For a poet, then, the task is to build interesting relationships with the line, white space, echoes of past writing — Paul Muldoon traces this aspect of the writing art in The End of the Poem — success, failure, the word “I”, truth, etc.)

… the dancer’s relationship with time, the space she dances in, her own body, its talents or injuries, the mirror, technique, specific elements of technique, isolation, company, space itself, risk, failure, success … building these relationships is the hidden art of the dancer.

For second-tier dancers, these relationships are apt to be simple. A second-tier dancer may have a flat conception of herself. She is used to the mirror; she likes to look good in the mirror; in her mind she flattens herself to the space of the mirror. She likes to do well, she is unhappy when she fails. She is afraid of pirouettes or she loves pirouettes. Perhaps she hates or fears her body. Not that a seemingly negative relationship cannot be interesting. I know a dancer who has an antagonistic relationship with her own beauty. Given a chance to shine, she contorts. Her outward momentum is never without a simultaneous recoil. It’s as if she thinks being beautiful is beneath her, and it probably is, given the economy of beauty and its sometimes eviscerating effect on the bearer. I’ve never seen this dancer escape from anything in the classic sense of transcendence, but the trouble she finds in even basic poses (first arabesque, first position with arms en bas) is itself an escape from stupidity and locked dichotomies.

One day, I saw L’s arabesque in class. It looked like something left out in the rain —like a ship’s prow, impervious (mostly) to the elements. It had something of the ruined castle about it too; not that it was actually decayed, more that it looked interestingly vacated — the owner gone from the windows, into the tunnels. What’s she doing in there? this arabesque made me ask. (If it were poetry, it would be the gilded screen of a perfect blank verse behind which the magician crosses his arms and considers us.)

I wondered where she’d been since she first launched that arabesque.

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.