Time to rethink what dance is for

US critics say the art form is being pushed to the margins. That makes it all the more crucial to nurture it, Michael Seaver writes from America's leading dance festival

'Mapping Modern Dance" was the phrase on the cover of every programme, not to mention on eagerly worn T-shirts, at this year's American Dance Festival, at Duke University in North Carolina. As a theme it is seductively objective, but the aspiration fell victim to subjective programming. Few festivals can give a comprehensive distillation of an art form, and although ADF has been associated with some of the most important dance premières and performances of the past 60 years, it is the sum of these six-week periods that creates a historical map rather than the programme in any one year.

But some interesting perspectives were on offer, and three programmes by the Paul Taylor Dance Company gave an overview of the choreographer's 50-year history. Charles Reinhart, the festival's president since 1968, has an association with Taylor dating back to his time as a company manager in the 1960s. After a screening of Dancemaker, a documentary on Taylor's work, Reinhart opened a question-and-answer session by addressing the audience with a jut of the chin.

"Do you know that the Paul Taylor Dance Company was the first modern dance company to provide enough weeks of employment for dancers that they were able to claim unemployment benefit when they weren't working?" With characteristic dryness Taylor interjected: "Of course they do Charles, you just said so on the documentary."

But it was a significant step for modern dancers and reflected, even in those early days, the popularity of Taylor's work, which matched everyday movement with an almost classic aesthetic.

Aureole (1962), which has been performed by the Royal Danish and London Festival (now English National) ballets, opened the first programme of his works. Set to music by Handel and with costumes by George Tacet - an imaginary childhood friend credited when Taylor himself costumes the dancers - it now evokes classicalism rather than modernism, and anything radical has been diluted by the intervening 40 years.

At the heart of Aureole and much of Taylor's work is the inherent contradiction in calling it modern. Modernity has been ascribed to choreographers such as Isadora Duncan, Doris Humphrey and Martha Graham, but they all sought inspiration in primitivism in order to seek the most "natural" way of moving. Duncan's tunic-clad performances in Greek ruins and Graham's works based on Greek legend look back in order to go forward.

During the annual conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars, held this year at ADF, Roger Copeland argued that the history of modern dance should begin with Merce Cunningham rather than Duncan. In his new book, Merce Cunningham And The Modernizing Of Modern Dance, he links Cunningham's work to a "move away from the hot, anguished, deeply personal energies of abstract expressionism towards a much cooler, brainy and impersonal mode of art-making".

While Taylor's range sweeps from the contemporary classicalism of Aureole and Airs (1978) to the arch theatricality of Le Grand Puppetier (2004), the only "modern" work presented (applying Copeland's theory) was the abstract 3 Epitaphs (1956). Here dancers are completely masked in Robert Rauschenberg's tight costumes, insewn with mirrors. Their simian movements to music by the Laneville-Johnson Union Brass Band are austere yet comic and contain an illogicality that keeps interest in the absence of a narrative.

Taylor's range of work also allowed the first disagreements within the Institute for Dance Criticism. With a rather grand title, it was a gathering of critics from around the United States - I was the only international representative - who spent three and a half weeks discussing dance, its presentation and criticism. Suzanne Carbonneau, a scholar and former dance critic with the Washington Post, facilitated the debates, as she did visits by other critics, choreographers, presenters and publicists. (Everything was off the record, the secrecy allowing for frank exchanges as well as juicy gossip.)

When problematic ethical issues to do with criticism and judgment emerged, Taylor again provided an example. His minimalist Seven New Dances, from 1957, (not performed at ADF) included pieces in which he merely stood behind a woman sitting on the floor or stuck a series of unrelated everyday poses to a recording of a speaking clock. Louis Horst, Martha Graham's musical mentor, was responsible for an infamous review of it in Dance Observer, in which the title was followed by four inches of blank space. His message was clear: no ink for no dance.

A more serious critical cop-out appeared in 1994 with Arlene Croce's 'Discussing the Undiscussable', a non-review of Bill T. Jones's Still/Here that appeared in the New Yorker. Still/Here features movement developed through workshops with people infected with HIV and a video installation of their experiences. Croce refused to attend the performance, claiming she couldn't review someone she felt "sorry for or hopeless about" and dubbing it "victim art". The backlash was immediate and vociferous, generating the most letters the New Yorker had ever received on a single topic and hastening Croce's retirement.

It was not just Still/Here that was called into question but also the nature of criticism itself. Joyce Carol Oates, writing later in the New York Times, suggested that Croce's "cri de coeur may be a landmark admission of the bankruptcy of the old critical vocabulary, confronted with ever-new and evolving forms of art".

The concept of difference, whether in body type or genre, re-emerged throughout the festival. Ronald K. Brown is an African-American choreographer whose quietly spiritual works address issues of community and race. His movement vocabulary, which is based on some west African forms, is not only seductive but also highly subtle. Although movements appear similar from piece to piece, there are some highly refined changes, although these go unnoticed by less sensitive eyes.

Tap dancing also falls on some critics' blind spots. The hoofers David Gilmore, Roxanne Butterfly and Jason Samuel Smith shared an evening of kathak and flamenco, but all voiced frustration at the lack of interest around tap from dance critics. Two days of discussion on tap with the scholar Constance Valis Hill helped plug some holes in knowledge, but, with a rich and sometimes politically precarious history, it is a genre that needs more critical attention.

Developing a lineage from ADF student to ADF featured artist is an important part of the festival's make-up. Former students Shen Wei and Larry Keigwin returned with their companies, as did the Russian Tatiana Baganova, with her Provincial Dances Theatre.

But in spite of the dialogue with guest choreographers and performers there was little interaction between the visiting critics and the dance schools that are the cornerstones of the festival. Opening dialogue between critics and artists is an imperative, and here was an opportunity for that to happen at an early stage of dancers' careers.

This mutual support is most important at times when opportunities for dance criticism are diminishing in the US. Mindy Aloff, a former dance critic with the New Republic, believes that arts coverage has suffered since the "war against art", when the National Endowment for the Arts was under attack, prompted by a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition and Andres Serrano's photograph Piss Christ. "It started fairly subtly", she wrote in a special edition of Press and Publicity magazine, "with 'adjustments' to the space given to critics and with increasing pressure on them to preview performances rather than to write about what actually took place." Lewis Segal of the Los Angeles Times believes criticism is now seen more as a consumer guide than as an important contribution to art.

Advertising is seen as key to editorial decisions, and publications suchas Dance Magazine openly admit a direct relationship between the two. But although the disproportionate number of film ads in newspapers could underwrite dance coverage, Segal feels that "the visibility of the art form has a lot to do with editorial justifications for downplaying dance". The Web offers an outlet for emerging writers, but it is also open to any opinionated dance fan, which means the quality of writing is uneven.

While strategies for other ways of dissemination are pursued, the essential dialogue between artist, audience and critic that shapes and questions how dances are made and valued is also needed. The facile conversation that takes place in the 15 minutes of ubiquitous post-performance talks is not enough. Change must come in the way dance is nurtured, valued and preserved.

With the presidential election looming in the US, new battle lines are being drawn in the culture wars, this time concerning television. Dance may get caught in the crossfire or, ironically, it's cultural invisibility may protect it. Whatever the outcome, the longevity of ADF suggests the art form is more robust than it may have appeared.

Michael Seaver attended the American Dance Festival on a New York Times fellowship