White House dance and more on criticism

So many things I've seen circulating online that I've been meaning to post lately! (And these aren't Atlanta-related so much as general dance topics.) 

A post from The Ballet Bag on dance criticism meets web 2.0 brings up many of the same discussions of how dance criticism meets the online world, as print journalism struggles to answer this question across the board. This post has interesting suggestions on how writers can and have been using links in their reviews to add more information for the reader about specific dance concepts or even videos of steps. So online, the educational component of the review becomes broader and the vocabulary a writer can use expands along with the word count.

Other links from this post that I want to highlight: a (rather in depth) interview from Ballet.co with NY Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay (who is apparently the last of the *paid* dance critic breed, according to an aside in this post by Tonya Plank.) Tendu TV's Marc Kirschner apparently suggested at the spring panel on dance criticism Ms. Plank took part in, a system for paying dance writers through a per ticket fee to audience members. That's one we didn't come up with at the Emory symposium! She says the panel discussed how that (and other things required by some of the changes in the definition of critic) would certainly blur the line for the critic's objectivity.


And speaking of Alastair Macaulay above, here's his NY Times article about the recent dance event at the White House. Everyone's excited that Michelle Obama organized a dance event along with the many other arts events, usually music and literature it seems, held at the White House on a pretty regular basis. Though it's by no means the first time dance has been hosted at the presidential residence, it's the first time in a LONG time, so that's great news for dance awareness generally. Here's an article from Dance/USA about the event as well. 

For more about the state of dance in general, here's an interesting piece also from the NY Times (but Gia Kourlas this time) on trends in contemporary choreography.   

I also wanted to point out that after finding Mr. Macaulay's interview I found that the Ballet.co site has a list of links to reviews and interviews of all sorts of dance from all over--almost a clipping service online for dance. Very useful/interesting!