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.