Entranced with dance

BY BERNADETTE RAE

The air crackles with suppressed animosity, though not for the star turn of the seminar, dance critic Joan Acocella.

Acocella writes passionately, intelligently and in award-winning style in the New Yorker. Her criticisms, award-winning features and profiles have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.

She has published three books: The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, a biography of Mark Morris, and a study of Andre Levinson, who she considers the first "dance critic," titled Andre Levinson on Dance.

The dance practitioners gathered in the Maidment Studio Theatre spare Acocella their aggression but none of their anguish.

Tears literally flow with the debate. Dance critic as interpreter? Dance critic as promoter? Dance critic as mentor?

The common view from the floor seems to be dance critic as monster, a quick-fix junkie disinclined and probably unable, to follow the dance inquiry below the superficial.

"I just don't trust dance critics," says one plaintive voice.

"Where did they fail?"

From his place on the panel, dancer and choreographer Lemi Poniofasio wonders if those who have written about him have any idea of what is going on in his heart and soul.

"The 60 minutes of performance are the least important part of what I do," he says.

"But do dance writers care? They treat dance as just another news item. It is only, 'Lemi is doing a new show ... Lemi has done a new show.'"

With her New York guts and gusto, Acocella carries the morning. She has been talking in New Zealand for a week, at Wellington and festival events, and her throat is giving way.

"I don't usually have this Marlene Dietrich thing," she says huskily, as she defines the dance critic from her talented and very informed point of view.

"When I am working I am just another person in a seat in the audience, looking at a show, asking, 'Am I having a good time, or am I not having a good time?"

Acocella quotes another American writer on dance, Edmund Denby, who said the critic's function was not so much to have the right opinions as to have opinions.

And she thinks less about the act of judgment now than she did as a budding reviewer 20 years ago.

"Criticism to me has always been just an extension of what I have always done, as a dance fan. And that is sit and watch and discuss it a bit afterwards.

"I didn't have a formal dance education. I come from an academic background in comparative literature, but was captured by dance along the way."

Acocella's first experience of the ballet was as a child, being taken by her enthusiastic mother to San Francisco from their home town of Oakland.

Her interest was set alight when she found herself in a soul-destroying job, editing psychology textbooks for Random House.

She had a PhD dissertation waiting to be written on the effect of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes on artists and intellectuals in Paris in London in 1909-14.

As well, she had a child to support.

She discovered that by working in the gift shop at the New York City Ballet she could get into performances free.

First it was once a week, then twice, then three times. From this came a compelling drive to write about what she saw.

Artists should note that people who write about dance don't do it for the money, or the power, or for the space they are allotted in publications, Acocella says.

"Dance writers have to be a pretty high-minded lot."

The magic of dance, muses Acocella, lies in its abstraction and the way a dancer's body becomes so trained and disciplined that it can impart the meaning of life in a symbolic way, "with beauty and exaltation."

Helping readers to understand that is the most important function of the dance critic, Acocella says. And she means readers, not just those who actually make it to the theatre.

"Only 5 per cent of Americans have ever seen a live dance performance, and that includes The Nutcracker.

"So I largely write for people who won't go and see the dance. I write essays - not consumer advice or judgment - in which I implicitly try to teach readers how to interpret and see meaning in dance and to give it a context.

"People feel they know enough to read a book or see a painting, and to have an opinion. But dance is different. I think what I do is another art form."

* Bernadette Rae is the Herald's dance critic.