I would like to place here an excerpt of a lecture I held on 2nd March, 2003 in Tallinn, Estonia, about my current vision of what dance criticism is all about.

Dance Criticism: Negotiating Knowledge, Taste, and Power

Introduction: Why Dance? Why Criticism?

Within the canon of "high culture" (i.e. all institutionalised forms, expressions, and genres), dance is considered to be the most universal of them all (next to music, of course). For dance is widely believed to communicate without words, without a specific language which we would have to learn in order to "understand" it. Dance has just the body and its movements. By articulating both it can express all it wants to all those who want to watch.

Dance according to this universalistic approach would be understandable everywhere and to everyone under all circumstances. Dance, then, is seen as a humanistic practice, in which national identities, specific cultural phenomena, social mediations or historic developments would be secondary to the ever new, dazzling impact of movement being carried out before our eyes.

It is understood in this line of thinking that dance would be the easiest form if not for production - because dance needs a lot of skill, technique, training, and dedication; but the easiest genre for consumption and thus also for communication, and finally also for touring, i.e. for international commerce. Contemporary Dance needs fewer staff, resources, logistics, etc. It is an interesting cultural commodity.

At the same time all those who have chosen dance either as their profession or as their field of personal interest will argue that dance, on the contrary, always takes place in a specific cultural context in which dance usually has a much harder time than the above universalist approach would imagine. For as 'easy' as dance may seem to be, as ill-regarded and grossly misunderstood it is by most of those protagonists and elites within society and politics who make decisions of vital interest to the existence and practice of dance.

One could come up with many reasons for this. But the most important one is probably the very fact of dance's presumed 'easy accessibility'. Within a logocentric society, a world that is based largely on text, language, and the translatability of every bit of reality into computable information, dance is deemed 'undercomplex'. Dance therefore would be too easy to be taken seriously.

It is in the context of this fundamental and also ideological split or maybe also this empirical dilemma of dance that criticism comes into play. Just as in Europe's history of the arts at large, many genres had been considered of little value compared to some established ones (painting in the middle ages, theatre in the age of enlightenment, architecture in the late 19th century), dance needs discourse in order to impose itself on the cultural agenda.

A lot of work has been achieved in that sense within the last one hundred years or so. But at the same pace that dance has been widely accepted as an 'important' cultural practice, it has also diversified so much and has lost so much of that which was presumed dance's 'original homogeneity' that today it has become a field of special interest. Especially contemporary dance which cannot be understood 'just like that'. Criticism comes to the fore in the very moment when dance has reached an important stage/phase in its existential development. Dance and criticism both depend heavily on each other. And both need to fight for their existence.

Understanding Criticism

In this process dance criticism is continuously losing its innocence - maybe again at the same pace that dance is losing its innocence. Dance criticism today is a profession which has to find its way through very conflicting interests. Among those interests are the person of the critic, his/her individual predilections, taste, knowledge of the field; but also his/her economic situation - which also has to do with the economic situation of the media he/she is working for.

And then there are the often conflicting interests within the critic's object - dance. For dance in itself does not exist. It is always represented by someone or something: dancers, companies, choreographers, producers, programme makers, presenters, theatres, festivals, audiences, cultural politicians and so on and so forth. So each of these actors in the vast arena of dance and culture resp. dance as culture will influence the reality of dance, and thus of dance criticism.

Dance criticism, then, is always a negotiation between various parameters - dance and its making, dance and its consumption first of all; the categories of taste, knowledge, privilege, and power - that to my opinion make up for the present situation of dance criticism at least in Europe and in the Western world. (...)