ABSTRACT
I want to start with a confession: I want to write ‘about dance’ – almost as though, firstly, you and I were already in agreement as to what the latter means, or might mean; and secondly, as though I ‘can write about dance’, even if it remains the case that my ‘dance writing’ can only be produced from my position as expert spectator, and on the basis of the relation to ‘dance’ that this spectating allows. Spectating, by the way, does tend to transform ‘dance’ into spectacle, by which I mean into an aspect of the wider, ubiquitous, pleasurable and very persuasive visual economy. Perhaps I should only write, on the basis of this limitation of mine, ‘about watching dance’, where this shift in words would, at the very least, put me in my place: I am not-a-performer, at least as far as expertise in the performance disciplines is concerned, and I am not-a-choreographer. What am I doing here? (The first answer, of course, is writing.)
Given my limitations as expert spectator and writer, even if I sit next to Rosemary Butcher, watching dance, at The Place, in London, as I have done a number of times over recent years,1 it is absolutely clear to me that how I watch, what I see, and what I make of it, will be different from Butcher’s own ways of watching, ways of seeing and experience of ‘the work’. I have become aware, for example, while watching Rosemary Butcher watching ‘dance’, that whereas I can ‘see dance’ as though it were projected on a screen, Rosemary Butcher, sitting in The Place beside me, also ‘sees dance’ multidimensionally, and through the lens specific to expert-practitioner performance-making.
