What I'm Seeing

and some thoughts on listings

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.