E-mails to friends

To C:

For my thesis I'm looking at new ways of writing about ballet, especially new modes of writing the dance review. It goes back to the fleeting moments thing. How can you make a singular artistic experience have staying power? I think art that is rooted in oral tradition (ballet and probably so much of the music you're discovering) is cast-off as an ugly duckling. There's very little (or no) written history, which makes it harder to ground or attach to other notions of what art is. It's still very wooly and wild to me, but I find that writing about ballet and writing about music have very similar problems.