A Personal Entry Point
I spent fifteen years in studios before I understood that my training had a history—that the "neutral" technique I absorbed was Graham's vocabulary, naturalized. Jack Anderson's A Letter to Dance (Oxford University Press, 2023, 312 pp.) never makes this explicit, which is both its charm and its limitation: it invites readers into dance's world without the apparatus of academic critique. For newcomers, this accessibility is a gift. For those seeking rigorous historiography, it may feel like a missed opportunity.
Who Is Jack Anderson, and Why Does He Matter?
Anderson is not merely "renowned"—he is institutionally embedded in American dance criticism in ways that shape this book's perspective. After four decades at The New York Times and foundational texts including Ballet and Modern Dance (1986) and The One and Only: The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (1981), he has earned the authority to write reflectively rather than argumentatively. A Letter to Dance is his ninth book, and it reads as a late-career summation: less a critical intervention than a curated memory palace of the performances, personalities, and polemics that occupied his professional life.
This positional awareness matters. Anderson writes as a witness, not an analyst. His critical framework—largely formalist, occasionally biographical, rarely theoretical—predates the body studies and performance theory that now dominate dance scholarship. Readers should know this going in: the book offers history as lived experience, not as problematized discourse.
Structure and Scope: What Anderson Chooses to Include—and Omit
The book is organized thematically across twelve chapters, each loosely tethered to a city, genre, or conceptual thread. The Paris and New York sections receive substantial treatment; Los Angeles, despite the jacket copy's promise, appears largely through the lens of Hollywood's borrowings from concert dance rather than studio culture proper.
Anderson's curatorial decisions reveal his enduring preoccupations. He devotes two full chapters to Graham's technique and its pedagogical afterlives, drawing on previously unpublished correspondence between Graham and her early accompanists—a archival depth absent from his earlier work. By contrast, Alvin Ailey is relegated to a five-page section on "Broadway Crossovers," nestled between discussions of Agnes de Mille and Bob Fosse. This is not oversight but argument: Anderson's skepticism toward commercial dance, a tension that surfaces more explicitly in his dismissive treatment of Chicago and A Chorus Line, shapes his historiographic map. Ailey's Revelations may have transformed American dance audiences; for Anderson, it remains suspect precisely because of that popularity.
The chapter on postmodern dance, spanning Judson Dance Theater through contemporary practitioners, is the book's most theoretically engaged—though "engaged" is relative. Anderson summarizes Yvonne Rainer's "No Manifesto" without substantially grappling with its anti-aesthetic implications, and he mentions Susan Foster's kinesthetic empathy research only to pivot quickly back to description. Readers seeking Anderson's own theory of how dance communicates will find the evocative assertion that "dance is a language that speaks to us in a way that words cannot"—a formulation that, while sentimentally satisfying, begs the question it purports to answer. How does it speak? To whom? Under what conditions of spectatorship?
The Writing Itself: Evocative, Yes, but How?
Anderson's prose achieves its effects through accumulation rather than precision. His reconstruction of Parisian ballet in the interwar years, for instance, relies on sensory detail—"the gasp of the Opéra Garnier's chandelier rising," "the particular rustle of Diaghilev's programs"—that transports without entirely enlightening. We learn what it felt like to be there, or what Anderson imagines it felt like, but not how these sensations constituted a specific historical moment's aesthetic politics.
This is deliberate craft, not failure. Anderson writes for readers who want to feel dance's history, not dissect it. Yet the absence of methodological transparency occasionally frustrates. When he describes a 1973 Cunningham performance he attended, his present-tense narration collapses critic and enthusiast in ways that obscure evaluative criteria. Was the work good? Important? Merely memorable to a young journalist? The reader cannot always distinguish.
The Book's Real Contribution
Where A Letter to Dance succeeds is in its implicit argument for criticism as a genre of literature. Anderson's decades of program notes, reviews, and occasional essays, revised and contextualized here, demonstrate how dance writing can endure beyond its journalistic occasion. His piece on Nureyev's 1962 debut, originally written for Dance Magazine, gains poignancy through retrospective framing; we read it
