I’ve been joking that with this new project, I’m going “back to my roots.” Writing dance listings was one of my first gigs as a freelance critic. For a few years in my mid-20s, I spent hours every other week combing through press releases and season calendars to come up with 80-word previews of work I often hadn’t seen or knew little about. I’m forever grateful for that job, which opened a lot of doors professionally, but I’ll be honest: I got really tired of doing it. What I resisted, in particular, was having to describe, and even kind of evaluate, events that hadn’t happened yet, piecing together clues from promotional materials, online research, and my own past experience (if I had any) of an artist’s work. Writing honestly and accurately could feel like a stretch.
Yet even within this imperfect format, I always enjoyed the possibility that one of my blurbs might introduce a reader somewhere to something new. (One time at a show, I found myself in conversation with a stranger who told me they were there because of my listing: satisfying!) I’m happy to be taking up a similar task again, but now in this more informal setting, where I can acknowledge how subjective an exercise this is, and also not pretend I know everything in advance. In these biweekly posts, I’ll be sharing some of the events on my dance calendar that I’m most excited and curious about, plus maybe a few other odds and ends. Like previous incarnations of Danceletter, this one is a bit of an experiment, and I hope to have some fun with it.