During our discussion with Jack Anderson, he said something that really struck me. He said that our role as critics and writers is to, "describe non-verbal art in verbal terms." While he was just emphasizing the same theme we have touched on many times, his terms finally made it click in my head just how difficult it is to capture the ephemerality of dance and how universal the question of doing so is.
While he was talking about the importance of evocation and evaluation in critiques he also touched on the ephemeral nature of dance in such a subtle way as to bring a question to my head the instant he said the above quote. In his transition he said that there needs to be more than just description in a critique, there needs to be some assessment or evaluation. You need to say something about it. At this time he off-handly mentioned that there were plenty of other mediums for dance description such notations and the like.
The question that came to my head is such: Is there any medium that is ideal for capturing, in a permanent way, dance? Certainly we have video and photography but even those lack the emotion and feel of seeing the performance live. Even more so, can writing ever capture dance on a page? Notations can capture the steps but they really lack a sense of quality and emotion. Critiques can offer description and assessment but they don't give any indication of exact steps or, sometimes, style of dance. Poems may capture the artistic nature and literary descriptions the emotional and thematic elements but, is there any way to capture the whole dance?
It is clearly important to preserve dance - both in description and critique - but can we ever ideally do it? While this may not have been the theme of his talk, Jack Anderson seemed all too aware of the question of how to capture dance for the future, for the masses, and for the artists.
I feel that there isn't any medium ideal for capturing dance in a permanent way. After spending weeks discussing various forms of written and drawn notation and watching videos, I feel that none of them capture enough of dance. Written notations can often be too vague, or focused on the trail of thought of the choreographer had, like Martha Graham's notes. In drawn notation, like Lucinda Childs', the spatial patterns are clearly defined but nothing else is there. In more established notations, like Laban, they are only fit to movements within a certain vocabulary. Videos cannot capture ever detail of every performer. This leads me to believe that using all forms for one dance would be the best way to fully recapture a dance, but it would be extremely time consuming to do all of them.
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