On Dance and Media Silence

I recently got a request to write a review of Last Minute Festival 2026 for Ravel Choreographic Review, in practice paid by the festival venue MDT (Moderna Dansteatern , red.). This reminded me of a discussion that was initiated this spring as a part of the writer group's evaluation of  Bastard Nordic, a cooperation between different Nordic festivals and organizations to promote writing about performing arts. The discussion can be summed up as follows: We all have our different interdependencies, backgrounds, preferences etc. that make the journalistic ideal of «objective» reviewing a problematic one, but there's still a difference between writing about something because the publisher set money aside for reporting on that subject or because funds were raised either by an artist, a festival or a venue to have coverage of their work, whether there is an independent publisher handling the commission or not. 

When the money derives from the presenter, some of us in the Bastard Nordic group argued, there is a risk of the text being drawn into the logic of pure publicity. One could of course out of principle say no to writing these types of texts, but the above-mentioned cases of Ravel and Bastard are no exceptions in the world of contemporary dance as I know it. I seem to have written more than ten review-like texts where the commissioner was directly or indirectly economically related to the artist. One could question it like I've done here, or one could think of it as an economic circuit of its own; one that operates a bit on the side of review journalism, maybe more similar to texts that we read in exhibition catalogues for visual arts or maybe with another purpose altogether. An example of this lies in Ravel's explicit interest in reflecting on «the fixity that traditions of (e)valuation in review writing can impose», proposing «review writing as an artistic or choreographic format in itself». 

I keep throwing myself between different perspectives on this type of commissioned texts, and in the end, I often say yes to writing them because I feel there is far too little written documentation and discussion with regards to contemporary dance practices. All the while, there is also far too little written that questions and challenges economic practices in contemporary dance. So here's one. I met this woman who used to be the culture editor of a bigger Swedish newspaper. She said to me she wouldn't have minded publishing more on contemporary dance, but no one ever proposed to write about it. I asked if she had any theory as to why. She said it's probably because contemporary dance is so fringe. «Fringe, in what sense?» I asked. Yes, she meant people outside the scene feel they don't understand it, so they don't even dare to write. For some reason, I didn't go into polemics when she said this. Maybe I should have. I could have stated that it's the work of a newspaper covering culture to let people know what is out there and also help make sense of it ­– because how do you expect anyone to feel invited and included when there is rarely any public writing about it? Instead, I went along with her explanation and said: «Okay, so your freelance critics might feel they don't understand dance. Then we need to find out why people from the dance community haven't contacted your newspaper, eager to share their opinions and analysis of their own field, just like literary critics who are also authors constantly do.» 

What came out of that was the conclusion that dance might be so much a field of collective meaning-making that its participants shy away from proposing to «judge» performances from an outside position, and that an unlucky effect of having parallel economic circuits for commenting on each other's work might be that we don't turn to the bigger newspaper outlets to discuss our controversies or agreements. It might even be that we frown a bit upon the un-savvy attempts by certain critics to approach dance from outdated or irrelevant perspectives, and feeling unjustly represented by bigger cultural media, we conclude that our own voices don't belong there.

This way of reasoning ended up sounding a lot like admitting contemporary dance is a club for internal admiration. I really don't think it is, or at least not exclusively or primarily. I think it has a carnal urgency that many (maybe against their own initial conviction) can relate to in a direct and physical way, that is not essentially different from what people feel when dancing in a night club, watching a music video or visiting their friend's salsa show. I'd even go so far as to say that having assumptions on how performing arts «should» function, for example by a rich experience of narrative theatre, might be a hindrance in interpreting contemporary dance. I'd guess a way of taking responsibility in all this would have been to write this piece for a Swedish newspaper and say: «Look, I wrote about dance, go ahead and publish it!» But here I am instead, assuming that I'll have a better outreach in the dance community with another type of publishing platform and with English as language. I simply wrote this for us. Having said this, here's a standing offer to anyone interested: If you want to pick up the torch and try sending your dance reviews/essays/articles to a newspaper but would like a colleague to proofread it first or advice on how to approach the process, go ahead and email me. I'll do my best to help out.

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About the author:

Tova Gerge works with text and performance. Has two MAs, one in Dramaturgy from Stockholm University of the Arts and another in Performing Arts from Paris 8. Interested in themes like power, body politics and subversive intimacy, and methods like prerecorded voice instructions, interactive game design, score-based movement and improvised conversations. She is member of the performing arts collective Nyxxx, the publishing house Dockhaveri and the artist-run production platform Skogen.

tova.gerge@gmail.com