A performance reenactment research of dance reviews

Dance and Writing

Throughout history, writers have written about dance in many forms trying to grasp the essence of what dance is, what it feels like and how it’s experienced – essentially translating physical experience into words. The dance-review genre, however, is more layered. Initially, this genre attempts to communicate the experience of watching dance with the aim to document the experience of performance. Nowadays, the dance review is used as a means to communicate the experience of the performance to the general public who was not present. The review, therefore becomes an evaluation and critique on the quality of the dance which ends up recommending it (or not) to the general public.  

A love/hate relationship 

As a choreographer who wishes to share my work as a live experience, I have a love/hate relationship with dance reviews. They are often useful and necessary to bring public awareness to my work but can also be misleading and even harmful. With this research, I wished to further understand and define this relationship through artistic research.  

Inspired by translation, I was curious in flipping the process around. What if we could perform the dance review? In this research I collected existing dance reviews of performances I have never seen and developed a practice of staging a reenactment based only on the information in the text. In other words; to perform a physical translation of the writing. What did this performance look like? What was missing? What did it reveal?