A thought on Dancing Intertexts

On page 17:

“Interpreting dances using textual analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach, one which ‘risks putting together in a single framework elements belonging to very diverse universes of discourse and research fields’ (de Marinis 1993: 6-7)”

This notion should extend beyond academic and theoretical writing and be exercised in the everyday articles and reviews of dance critics and writers. Heavily descriptive reviews no longer serve the purpose of posterity or relay the experience to a new set of viewers: describing the event only singles it out more and excludes a readership that could potentially have an interest in ballet. Reviews must balance necessary description with critical interpretations of what the ballet means in a broader context. This can be done by looking at the ballet through many lenses: economics, history, gender issues, social media, film.

The use of ‘risk’ in the quote above interests me. It suggests that textual analyses should be taking these risks. Textual analyses owe it to ballets — whose choreographers have drawn from a range of disciplines to create — continue to bring more ideas and contexts into the context of the review. If reviewers were to think of the ballet not simply as a performance, but also as a text that is a creation of many parts, reviews could be more interpretive than descriptive. Instead of documenting how a ballet looked on-stage, they could critically document how a ballet looked in the context of its time and society.

The definition of ‘text’ can extend beyond the ballets themselves and the written analyses; the form of the text can be as multidisciplinary as the content addressed. By writing a review in the form of a film, critics can still “put together in a single framework elements belonging to very diverse universes of discourse and research fields,” and altering how that review is disseminated (film, rather than conventional 400-500 text words), also adds to the discourse. A film-review, rather than a written one, challenges the critic to draw from a completely different camp of ideas: the critic must convey an opinion and ideas using a different set of resources, such as already available footage, sound, and animation.