On That Annoying New Trend

At the Dance Magazine site, (via "You've Cott Mail") Editor-in-Chief Wendy Perron writes about "an annoying new trend of blogging about the process"

I realize a blog is a good way to keep your website alive and to involve your potential audience. But explaininghow you make a dance, the problems you encounter and how you solve them, is not going to help either you as the choreographer or your potential audience. To dig into your imagination enough to make a dance, you need to be embroiled in a place where there is no explanation. As Igor Stravinsky once said, you have to dig underground, in the dark, like a mole, groping for what comes next. You have to be willing to sink into that layer of not knowing in order to come up with something you’ve never seen or done before. During that beginning period, putting it into words denies the groping phase. You should be utterly at a loss for words, just feeling your way. After a while, you can start to justify your decisions to yourself, to your dancers, or to your audience if your presenter so wishes. But first, you have to be willing to be lost in that pre-verbal place.

I think she completely misses the boat. 335 BCE. A book about making art is written. It is the earliest know work on how to make art. Aristotle's Poetics has influenced western culture since.

Perron closes with "And no one can tell you how to transform that necessity into art." That may well be true, but it hasn't stopped artists from trying. The internet is little different from papyrus in that impulse.

Polykleitos spent a great deal of time consciously justifying his decisions. Figuring out how to make his work. Groping for words to describe his work. He wrote a book about it, Kanon (though now lost.) He looked at mathematical proportions for the perfect sculpture. He's also considered one of the greatest sculptors the world has seen.

Artists have been writing about how they see the world, and their art, for as long as artists have been able to write. They have been writing about how they create just as long. Choreographers have long written about dance.

Can she truly feel that attempting to write about the pre-verbal place compromises someone's creative process? There are mountains of work that would directly contradict that. I can't fathom an editor of a dance magazine not having read The Notebooks of Martha Graham.

Is she trying to play gatekeeper? Is most of what she's read simply boring? What is Perron getting at?

Not having the ability to comment on a blog shows they don't understand how most of the internet works. So of course they wouldn't understand why people would want to write about their process on the internet.  Fair enough, there's more than enough stuff out there that doesn't add much to a conversation.

I am talking about young choreographers, anxious to be in the public eye, who think that writing about what happened that day in the studio will somehow 1) bring them a wider audience and/or 2) make them a better choreographer.

To think that attempting to explain and search for the language to describe someone's process is ignorant of how humans are wired. Connecting with "that pre-verbal place" and trying to communicate out of that is the base of the artistic impulse. Simply looking inward, hiding underground like a mole is only one part of the equation.

Attempting to translate into language doesn't deny part of the process. Following the Trail, finding how to communicate your way out of the cave of wonders is the most important part of the artistic process. It is in that part of the journey where an artist connects the imagination with the created work or piece. Attempting to write about that transformational process doesn't weaken to process. It helps you learn.

I would have though a dance magazine editor would be in favor of writing about art.