Please note, the Inquirer articles are no longer available online. Please contact me if you are interested in reading them.
A spate of recent articles and essays:
On the Dance With Camera show at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philly - http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/79879367.html
Observations about the recent International Association of Blacks in Dance conference and performances - http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/82034482.html
A review of Fraulein Maria - http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/arts/70213087.html
And a piece on the Dance Advance archive where I had great latitude and mused about performance and travel in Asia - http://www.pcah.us/m/dance/six-reflections-six-snapshots.pdf
Friday, March 12, 2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
A Letter to the New York Times
To the Editors,
If dance is the “art with no history” as Alastair Macaulay states, fair and broad-minded reporting of it, which IS in effect its history, is all the more crucial. In Mr. Macaulay’s assessment of the last decade in dance (Choreographic Climate Change, 12/31), he dismissed the downtown modern and post-modern segment of the field as “too large for anyone to keep complete track of it.” Dance’s cutting edge is no more unwieldy than that of any other artistic field; this statement reads as lack of personal interest.
While the Times’ senior critic has considerable knowledge and skill, he’s missing the curiosity required for comprehensive reporting on dance. Biases become a problem. How can he limn the 1980’s without mention of Trisha Brown whose innovations in physical language and choreographic devices permanently changed the face of contemporary dance? While Mr. Macaulay’s stated preference for ‘joy’ in dance is understandable, deep investigation and the continuing evolution of the art form merit acknowledgement.
Sincerely yours,
Lisa Kraus
Macaulay's article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/arts/dance/03choreography.html
If dance is the “art with no history” as Alastair Macaulay states, fair and broad-minded reporting of it, which IS in effect its history, is all the more crucial. In Mr. Macaulay’s assessment of the last decade in dance (Choreographic Climate Change, 12/31), he dismissed the downtown modern and post-modern segment of the field as “too large for anyone to keep complete track of it.” Dance’s cutting edge is no more unwieldy than that of any other artistic field; this statement reads as lack of personal interest.
While the Times’ senior critic has considerable knowledge and skill, he’s missing the curiosity required for comprehensive reporting on dance. Biases become a problem. How can he limn the 1980’s without mention of Trisha Brown whose innovations in physical language and choreographic devices permanently changed the face of contemporary dance? While Mr. Macaulay’s stated preference for ‘joy’ in dance is understandable, deep investigation and the continuing evolution of the art form merit acknowledgement.
Sincerely yours,
Lisa Kraus
Macaulay's article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/arts/dance/03choreography.html
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Contemplating the Cambodians...
I took part in “By Gesture By Word” – workshops and presentations on Cambodian Dance with members of the Khmer Arts Ensemble, sponsored by Dance Advance. Here are some reflections:
1 Dancing has the power to lift you out of misery. In daily practice Chamreoun Yin worked adjacent to me as we learned the “giant” role, one of the primary archetypes from Cambodian dance. He had never worked on this role before. He first danced classical Cambodian dance thirty years before in a refugee camp, at the time when his entire country had been subjected to extreme violence and destruction. You could see on his face that doing this dancing was a refuge – a space of equanimity, of serenity, of joy. The power of inhabiting these slow-moving, spatially contained and gesturally detailed forms is, by its nature, one of growing more centered and uplifted and connected to the divine.
2 You can see what is in someone’s mind. I was fascinated to read on the faces of Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, her sister Charya Burt and the two younger dancers from Khmer Arts a quality that is transmitted to the collective: each of them projects an image of extreme dignity, restraint, and (what I read as) fundamental goodness. The half-smile seen on the gigantic faces of the Buddhas at Bayon is on their faces. Their eyes are steady, confident, receptive, awake. None of this appears pasted on, but instead seems to emanate from entering a particular a state of mind, a collectively understood experience. This may be engendered through initially assuming the form, but in time it comes to be a much deeper expression, where practicing the dances seems to shift one’s mind.
3 Small can be more powerful than big. As giants we had some large actions – brandishing our swords, declaring an intent to catch our enemy. But we also had many subtle shifts in the torso, ripples moving from the ribcage to head or from the wrist through to the head. This was even more prevalent in the women’s role: certain actions were so small as to be nearly invisible, vibrations almost, like a beat of hummingbirds’ wings. I love this quality of “resting” on one spot as a very tiny movement animates the body and space.
4 There is a space in between holding fast to tradition and throwing away the past to focus solely on the “new.” Many artists are looking for a way to effectively balance respect for and conservation of what has gone before with an openness to new influences and innovations. Questions about how to practice traditional arts in a contemporary way are paramount for many of the traditional artists who took part in this workshop. And for those of us coming out of the experimental wing of our field, the question is how to effectively embrace, build on and bring along the knowledge and strategies of what has gone before.
5 As an older dancer, it’s completely appropriate to be judicious while putting my body in situations that could result in injury. Being somewhat more delicate and more prone to injury than when I was younger, I am “conservative” regarding how I want to use and train my body. This feels completely correct. Stretches designed to actually alter the shape of the body (like ones to create a hyper-extended elbow) felt awful and I chose not to do them.
6 Devotion to lineage is at the heart of Cambodian dance study. My study as a Buddhist emphasizes this as well. I could feel in my fellow participants a kind of settling into the spiritual aspects of this dance practice, with this one idea as an entry-point.
7 Providing simple frameworks for responses to arise can be more effective than more carefully crafted “assignments” or forums. Our group was asked simply to present some of our work and examine how the contact with the Cambodian dancing is relevant to it. The range of responses was stunning, reflecting a deep connection and thoughtful contemplation. I was very impressed with what practicing and hearing about the forms brought to each of us.
8 Cultures that emphasize the individual are more likely to celebrate the lone-wolf auteur. Cultures that prize the life of the group and community are more likely to hold to tradition. “Conservative,” in the sense of preserving what from the past is of value, is not a dirty word. When we abandon conservation because we so prize the innovators, the named artists who are stars rather than the anonymous ones whose work preserves and builds on what has gone before, what have we lost? Is our sense of societal disconnect and tendency toward isolation bound up with this? This question has nagged at me since visiting Bali in '85. On returning to the U.S. I remember writing a grant application complaining of our collective "cultural bankruptcy." That's one application that certainly didn't get funded!
1 Dancing has the power to lift you out of misery. In daily practice Chamreoun Yin worked adjacent to me as we learned the “giant” role, one of the primary archetypes from Cambodian dance. He had never worked on this role before. He first danced classical Cambodian dance thirty years before in a refugee camp, at the time when his entire country had been subjected to extreme violence and destruction. You could see on his face that doing this dancing was a refuge – a space of equanimity, of serenity, of joy. The power of inhabiting these slow-moving, spatially contained and gesturally detailed forms is, by its nature, one of growing more centered and uplifted and connected to the divine.
2 You can see what is in someone’s mind. I was fascinated to read on the faces of Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, her sister Charya Burt and the two younger dancers from Khmer Arts a quality that is transmitted to the collective: each of them projects an image of extreme dignity, restraint, and (what I read as) fundamental goodness. The half-smile seen on the gigantic faces of the Buddhas at Bayon is on their faces. Their eyes are steady, confident, receptive, awake. None of this appears pasted on, but instead seems to emanate from entering a particular a state of mind, a collectively understood experience. This may be engendered through initially assuming the form, but in time it comes to be a much deeper expression, where practicing the dances seems to shift one’s mind.
3 Small can be more powerful than big. As giants we had some large actions – brandishing our swords, declaring an intent to catch our enemy. But we also had many subtle shifts in the torso, ripples moving from the ribcage to head or from the wrist through to the head. This was even more prevalent in the women’s role: certain actions were so small as to be nearly invisible, vibrations almost, like a beat of hummingbirds’ wings. I love this quality of “resting” on one spot as a very tiny movement animates the body and space.
4 There is a space in between holding fast to tradition and throwing away the past to focus solely on the “new.” Many artists are looking for a way to effectively balance respect for and conservation of what has gone before with an openness to new influences and innovations. Questions about how to practice traditional arts in a contemporary way are paramount for many of the traditional artists who took part in this workshop. And for those of us coming out of the experimental wing of our field, the question is how to effectively embrace, build on and bring along the knowledge and strategies of what has gone before.
5 As an older dancer, it’s completely appropriate to be judicious while putting my body in situations that could result in injury. Being somewhat more delicate and more prone to injury than when I was younger, I am “conservative” regarding how I want to use and train my body. This feels completely correct. Stretches designed to actually alter the shape of the body (like ones to create a hyper-extended elbow) felt awful and I chose not to do them.
6 Devotion to lineage is at the heart of Cambodian dance study. My study as a Buddhist emphasizes this as well. I could feel in my fellow participants a kind of settling into the spiritual aspects of this dance practice, with this one idea as an entry-point.
7 Providing simple frameworks for responses to arise can be more effective than more carefully crafted “assignments” or forums. Our group was asked simply to present some of our work and examine how the contact with the Cambodian dancing is relevant to it. The range of responses was stunning, reflecting a deep connection and thoughtful contemplation. I was very impressed with what practicing and hearing about the forms brought to each of us.
8 Cultures that emphasize the individual are more likely to celebrate the lone-wolf auteur. Cultures that prize the life of the group and community are more likely to hold to tradition. “Conservative,” in the sense of preserving what from the past is of value, is not a dirty word. When we abandon conservation because we so prize the innovators, the named artists who are stars rather than the anonymous ones whose work preserves and builds on what has gone before, what have we lost? Is our sense of societal disconnect and tendency toward isolation bound up with this? This question has nagged at me since visiting Bali in '85. On returning to the U.S. I remember writing a grant application complaining of our collective "cultural bankruptcy." That's one application that certainly didn't get funded!
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Honoring Mama Kariamu
photo by Joseph V. Labolito/Temple University
How often does a concert end on a note of such unbridled joy that audience members head out into the night singing? Kariamu & Company: Traditions’ concerts at Temple University celebrating 40 years of Umfundalai technique ended in just this way, with a shared ecstasy and sense of affirmation more reminiscent of a community gathering than a concert in a proscenium theater.
Dr. Kariamu Welsh (Mama Kariamu), head of the Dance Department at Temple, makes dances, but I experienced them in this concert more as vessels into which her dancers pour every drop of their passion and personal power. They address tragedies of diaspora and challenges of urban life with humor, urgency, unity and dignity.
Works from across the years were interspersed with moving testimonies by students who became teachers themselves. C. Kemal Nance, Kariamu’s student from the time he was 8 years old, is today a doctoral candidate and a powerhouse mover. Each of the older dancers who demonstrated their moves was a knockout, having applied her teaching over the long haul.
Honoring the life’s work of those who develop techniques, foster the development of dancers, and provide them with fulfilling performing opportunities doesn’t happen nearly enough. Mama Kariamu, whose Umfundalai technique amalgamates aspects of dance languages from all over Africa, richly deserves this tribute.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Lucy Guerin Inc. in "Corridor"
I am hooked on Lucy Guerin’s Corridor. It’s a slow burn; with the company at Bryn Mawr College where I curate the Performing Arts Series, I saw the show five times over the course of two days and will be sustained on it for months.
What is it that’s gotten so under my skin? The dancing is the best I can recall in ages. Like a family of singers with distinct voices but whose DNA makes their tones blend beautifully, most of the three men and three women trained at Australia’s Victorian College of the Arts, which reliably turns out great dancers. They are fleet, flexible, brazen movers who are neither blank nor overly emotive. I could watch them forever.
Corridor’s scenes sweep up and down the expanse of an eighty-foot swath of marley flooring, building a tone at once humorous and terrifying. The show emerges stealthily out of the two parallel rows of audience facing each other as seated dancers answer their cell phones and begin milling about and chatting, some shushed by audience members confused by this hazy beginning. What ensues is a slew of variations on responding to inputs and commands, with seemingly less and less ability to fulfill anything completely. At one point the malaise manifests in a “sickness” duet with actions of retching, flinching, and groaning woven rhythmically into a tour-de-force essay on all-too-familiar suffering.
Sections are handsomely crafted, with any piece of the whole having its own ebb and flow, twists and turns. The sickness duet sputters and restarts and ends, surprisingly, as a quintet with all, doggy-style, looking up to Byron Perry as he segues into a new solo. Still, the whole does not easily cohere, and is no easy-read. As the setting shifts completely in the piece’s last quarter to a dark and ominous world of lab coats and lights from a rolling octopus-like structure trained on intimate encounters, the sense of puzzling out the meaning of the overall picture feels adult– complex and not easily contained.
Mirrored panels onstage and moving light boxes shuttled behind the audience let dancing be seen behind layers of shiny, smoky obscuration. As dancers and panels move up and down the long, narrow playing space each audience member has moments of watching at extremely close range, and other times of seeing as though down a very long hallway, observing different elements stacked.
Guerin’s physical language has absorbed everything from the classical to the released to the studied gesture. The dancers can create flow and connection between their movements but astonish most with intricately spliced action: footwork moves to tiny hand gesture, to big flailing fall, to bounding leap. In the case of Perry, whose marathon solo is framed by checking himself out in the mirrors on either end of the space, this quick cutting reaches a virtuosic zenith.
His utterances are halfway mumbled, or shouted, his focus turns on a dime. He is the modern multi-tasker, the one navigating too many inputs, impulses and possibilities. Life marches on around him in the guise of four dancers shuttling back and forth with technique class skips and leaps, now backward, now arcing. Perry hurls himself through space, as though on a continuously shifting precipice, and the quick change dynamics and broken snippets of commentary make him seem slightly mad.
In fact, they all begin to seem half-mad, part of a world gone crazy. Is it their constricted space? The effort and speed of trying to keep up? The continual inputs from MP3 players, being told what to do by the wielder of the microphone or blaring speakers, the subliminal messaging – all that “stim”?
Corridor is unsettling, not least because it ends on an ambiguous note of violence, with the soundscape mounting into a whirling machine-driven storm. Finally it all cuts out; the plug is pulled. In Thomas Great Hall the vast, dark space where we are left reverberates with afterimages of distress, with no easy fix.
I felt surprisingly tender toward these people portraying contemporary malaise, trying their best, coupling elegantly, fervently or manically, sailing through space with fine-tuned precision or shuttling through phrases of rhythmic non-sequitors: pop, you’re here, oops, sliding off there, and wow what about this thing? Movement mirrors mind. Guerin’s got it nailed.
The love of dance is life-long and getting a fix like Corridor comes not so often. I treasure the intelligence, dedication and gifts that make such moments in the theater possible. The poor artist is rich indeed.
What is it that’s gotten so under my skin? The dancing is the best I can recall in ages. Like a family of singers with distinct voices but whose DNA makes their tones blend beautifully, most of the three men and three women trained at Australia’s Victorian College of the Arts, which reliably turns out great dancers. They are fleet, flexible, brazen movers who are neither blank nor overly emotive. I could watch them forever.
Corridor’s scenes sweep up and down the expanse of an eighty-foot swath of marley flooring, building a tone at once humorous and terrifying. The show emerges stealthily out of the two parallel rows of audience facing each other as seated dancers answer their cell phones and begin milling about and chatting, some shushed by audience members confused by this hazy beginning. What ensues is a slew of variations on responding to inputs and commands, with seemingly less and less ability to fulfill anything completely. At one point the malaise manifests in a “sickness” duet with actions of retching, flinching, and groaning woven rhythmically into a tour-de-force essay on all-too-familiar suffering.
Sections are handsomely crafted, with any piece of the whole having its own ebb and flow, twists and turns. The sickness duet sputters and restarts and ends, surprisingly, as a quintet with all, doggy-style, looking up to Byron Perry as he segues into a new solo. Still, the whole does not easily cohere, and is no easy-read. As the setting shifts completely in the piece’s last quarter to a dark and ominous world of lab coats and lights from a rolling octopus-like structure trained on intimate encounters, the sense of puzzling out the meaning of the overall picture feels adult– complex and not easily contained.
Mirrored panels onstage and moving light boxes shuttled behind the audience let dancing be seen behind layers of shiny, smoky obscuration. As dancers and panels move up and down the long, narrow playing space each audience member has moments of watching at extremely close range, and other times of seeing as though down a very long hallway, observing different elements stacked.
Guerin’s physical language has absorbed everything from the classical to the released to the studied gesture. The dancers can create flow and connection between their movements but astonish most with intricately spliced action: footwork moves to tiny hand gesture, to big flailing fall, to bounding leap. In the case of Perry, whose marathon solo is framed by checking himself out in the mirrors on either end of the space, this quick cutting reaches a virtuosic zenith.
His utterances are halfway mumbled, or shouted, his focus turns on a dime. He is the modern multi-tasker, the one navigating too many inputs, impulses and possibilities. Life marches on around him in the guise of four dancers shuttling back and forth with technique class skips and leaps, now backward, now arcing. Perry hurls himself through space, as though on a continuously shifting precipice, and the quick change dynamics and broken snippets of commentary make him seem slightly mad.
In fact, they all begin to seem half-mad, part of a world gone crazy. Is it their constricted space? The effort and speed of trying to keep up? The continual inputs from MP3 players, being told what to do by the wielder of the microphone or blaring speakers, the subliminal messaging – all that “stim”?
Corridor is unsettling, not least because it ends on an ambiguous note of violence, with the soundscape mounting into a whirling machine-driven storm. Finally it all cuts out; the plug is pulled. In Thomas Great Hall the vast, dark space where we are left reverberates with afterimages of distress, with no easy fix.
I felt surprisingly tender toward these people portraying contemporary malaise, trying their best, coupling elegantly, fervently or manically, sailing through space with fine-tuned precision or shuttling through phrases of rhythmic non-sequitors: pop, you’re here, oops, sliding off there, and wow what about this thing? Movement mirrors mind. Guerin’s got it nailed.
The love of dance is life-long and getting a fix like Corridor comes not so often. I treasure the intelligence, dedication and gifts that make such moments in the theater possible. The poor artist is rich indeed.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Across the Great Divide
I wish I’d eavesdropped more after the A.W.A.R.D. show finale. Passing a parked van with disappointed dancers returning home (not sure which group they were from), I overheard “All they did was….” And then I filled in the blank to form a picture through their eyes of Nichole Canuso’s winning contact duet. “All they did was” roll around, pull and push each other, find lifts and perches, look out with quizzical perplexity. What they didn’t do was power leaps, or turns, or high legs. Or high drama, or unison, or big full out expression to thumping music.
The A.W.A.R.D. show concluded as it began, with audience and dancers divided into camps depending on personal allegiance and dance orientation. I wish I could say it expanded people’s ideas about what dance is and can be. Having been at just two of the four nights, I can’t fully say. But my impression is that once all the butts were in the seats, this captive audience could have used more skillful ways to get thinking outside their respective boxes. On Wednesday, the lady behind me commented on Gabrielle Revlock’s arch and extremely virtuosic hula hoop marathon: “She’s just hula hooping, that’s not dance.” It seems to me that by pitting different styles against each other and not offering dialogue illuminating what’s there to be appreciated, the audience gets left exactly where it started. The choreographers did speak about their individual aims in the preliminaries. But these kinds of descriptions are frequently far removed from what’s actually onstage and don’t necessarily help a watcher know how to “read” a dance.
On TV, talent contests involve judges talking about why what they see is or isn’t strong. And that helps a viewer understand what to look for. Here the judges voted behind closed doors and were all of one stripe – NY “downtown.” Bigwigs, sure. But were they capable of fairly judging “show” dance or contemporary tap?
I was distressed that a process that was supposed to uncover the best young choreographers in Philly ended up with a finale that from a choreographic point of view was exceedingly weak. As a Philadelphia-based dance artist, I was embarrassed that our community should be represented by work that seemed so unworldly – caught in a time warp, and, at its worst, unschooled in effective composition.
Maybe I’m wrong in thinking that I appreciate dance that’s well done, no matter the style. Maybe dance has its inflexible territorial equivalent of red states and blue states, evangelical right versus liberal left. Would it help to agree on substantive criteria that would allow us to “fairly” assess merits across wide gulfs? Potential, Originality, Execution and Merit, the rubric suggested at the A.W.A.R.D. show, seems insufficient. Would rolling up the sleeves to look more deeply just drive audience away? It’s a delicate, ahem, dance. And how much of looking is going to be subjective and alchemical no matter what?
If the aims of the A.W.A.R.D. show are to develop an audience for dance, the most helpful gesture in that direction came from Lois Welk, head of DanceUSA/Philadelphia who offered to pay for the ticket of anyone in the finale audience who goes to see a dance group they haven’t seen before within the next 30 days. Now that’s a tantalizing goad to seeing, and hopefully appreciating, more dance!
The A.W.A.R.D. show concluded as it began, with audience and dancers divided into camps depending on personal allegiance and dance orientation. I wish I could say it expanded people’s ideas about what dance is and can be. Having been at just two of the four nights, I can’t fully say. But my impression is that once all the butts were in the seats, this captive audience could have used more skillful ways to get thinking outside their respective boxes. On Wednesday, the lady behind me commented on Gabrielle Revlock’s arch and extremely virtuosic hula hoop marathon: “She’s just hula hooping, that’s not dance.” It seems to me that by pitting different styles against each other and not offering dialogue illuminating what’s there to be appreciated, the audience gets left exactly where it started. The choreographers did speak about their individual aims in the preliminaries. But these kinds of descriptions are frequently far removed from what’s actually onstage and don’t necessarily help a watcher know how to “read” a dance.
On TV, talent contests involve judges talking about why what they see is or isn’t strong. And that helps a viewer understand what to look for. Here the judges voted behind closed doors and were all of one stripe – NY “downtown.” Bigwigs, sure. But were they capable of fairly judging “show” dance or contemporary tap?
I was distressed that a process that was supposed to uncover the best young choreographers in Philly ended up with a finale that from a choreographic point of view was exceedingly weak. As a Philadelphia-based dance artist, I was embarrassed that our community should be represented by work that seemed so unworldly – caught in a time warp, and, at its worst, unschooled in effective composition.
Maybe I’m wrong in thinking that I appreciate dance that’s well done, no matter the style. Maybe dance has its inflexible territorial equivalent of red states and blue states, evangelical right versus liberal left. Would it help to agree on substantive criteria that would allow us to “fairly” assess merits across wide gulfs? Potential, Originality, Execution and Merit, the rubric suggested at the A.W.A.R.D. show, seems insufficient. Would rolling up the sleeves to look more deeply just drive audience away? It’s a delicate, ahem, dance. And how much of looking is going to be subjective and alchemical no matter what?
If the aims of the A.W.A.R.D. show are to develop an audience for dance, the most helpful gesture in that direction came from Lois Welk, head of DanceUSA/Philadelphia who offered to pay for the ticket of anyone in the finale audience who goes to see a dance group they haven’t seen before within the next 30 days. Now that’s a tantalizing goad to seeing, and hopefully appreciating, more dance!
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Defining Dance: A Letter to the Broad Street Review
To the Editor:
Jim Rutter’s critique of “more.” in the Broad Street Review (“Is it Art- or Just Movement?”) evokes the tired question “Is it dance?”. Whatever Rutter’s response to Headlong Dance Theater’s newest work, I suggest that he and every critic in Philadelphia catch up to what was a groundbreaking revelation in the 1960’s at New York’s Judson Church: Dance can be all-encompassing and does not need to be fashioned of traditionally virtuosic movement. Pieces that forever changed the field include Trisha Brown’s “Man Walking Down the Side of Building” which was, literally, that, or “Roof Piece” in which semaphore-like gestures were passed, as in the game ‘telephone,’ over the rooftops of then-developing Soho. Neither of these might have been recognizable as “dance” in their day, but both have come to be seen unequivocally as dance, and as representing the commendable artistic adventurousness of an era. Must we keep going backward? Critics are responsible for speaking from a context of knowing their field, and their field of today, not that of a half-century back.
Sincerely,
Lisa Kraus
Jim Rutter’s critique of “more.” in the Broad Street Review (“Is it Art- or Just Movement?”) evokes the tired question “Is it dance?”. Whatever Rutter’s response to Headlong Dance Theater’s newest work, I suggest that he and every critic in Philadelphia catch up to what was a groundbreaking revelation in the 1960’s at New York’s Judson Church: Dance can be all-encompassing and does not need to be fashioned of traditionally virtuosic movement. Pieces that forever changed the field include Trisha Brown’s “Man Walking Down the Side of Building” which was, literally, that, or “Roof Piece” in which semaphore-like gestures were passed, as in the game ‘telephone,’ over the rooftops of then-developing Soho. Neither of these might have been recognizable as “dance” in their day, but both have come to be seen unequivocally as dance, and as representing the commendable artistic adventurousness of an era. Must we keep going backward? Critics are responsible for speaking from a context of knowing their field, and their field of today, not that of a half-century back.
Sincerely,
Lisa Kraus
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