ABSTRACT
If one were to summarize the essential differences between the best nineteenth-and twentietlvcentury dance criticism (the differences between the writing of say, Gautier on the one hand and that of Denby or Jowitt on the other), the key contrast would surely be the latter's greatly improved capacity for describing the exact contours of the body in motion. Gautier provides the reader with a wonderfully vivid sense of the mental images the dance evoked in his mind's eye ('Taglioni reminded you of cool and shaded valleys where a white vision suddenly emerges from the bark of an oak'), but alas, very little sense of what the choreography itself actually looked like. The best twentietlvcentury dance critics haven't - by any means - abandoned the evocative phrase or the visual analogy, but unlike Gautier, they also strive to provide the reader with a palpable sense of the dance as a thing-in-itself, independent of the imaginative faculties of the perceiver.
