I started writing about dance in the mid-2000s. I won’t say that the state of professional arts journalism was exactly sanguine at the time, but as I remember it now, it was at least possible to think of arts journalism as a profession with a future. I had lots of senior colleagues then, people I […]

The brilliant dance writer Sally Banes, who pioneered a new way to write about dance as a social phenomenon, died on June 14, 2020 of ovarian cancer. Banes visited New York in October 1973 with a standard assignment: to write a book on modern dance for Chicago Review Press. Because of her curiosity about choreography, […]

When I started writing about dance professionally a decade ago, the experience was akin to taking baby steps among giants. There was something profoundly humbling—not to mention terrifying—about reviewing a new Odette/Odile in the same pages as Clement Crisp, who saw his first performance in 1942 and famously quipped: “I want to hear from someone […]

When I first came to dance criticism in the 1970s, the professional critics were predominantly much older than me. I didn’t know them personally and, as the wide-eyed new kid on the block, I assumed most had little or no physical training in the art. As slightly intimidated as I felt at the time—you try […]