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What incites or inspires you to review ballet?


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I wasn't sure where to post this question, so it went here, if the moderators should want to move it, please feel free!

 

After I started delving into the activity of "reviewing" (I take the liberty of using this particular word, knowing it doesn't necessarily cover what my writings actually are) the Royal Danish Ballet's performances I attend, I have found myself curious as to what incites or inspires other "non-professional" (again, I use this word broadly to mean "not writing official reviews for newspapers or magazines") reviewers to review ballet performances on their blogs, websites or here?

 

When it comes to reviewing performances here, I started doing it as a way of keeping the experience more sharply in memory, because getting things out in words helps me remember better - but also for the sake of letting people who don't get to see the RDB follow things here, there are a very limited range of voices on the RDB available in English, so one more couldn't hurt, I thought. Being able to partake in a debate about the performances I saw only made things better!

 

As for the writings I do in Danish, it's a mix of a "getting better at writing" project and being an audience voice on the Internet where very few people talk about the RDB, besides the reviewers from the newspapers and even there, it seems to be the same two-to-four people with the same two-to-four opinions. I particularly wanted to focus on the good aspects of every performance I saw, even those performances I didn't think of as the greatest of them, because I know it'll probably mostly be non-balletomanes who read my writings and I would definitely love to be the incentive for more non-balletgoers to try dipping their toes into the world of the RDB. In my experience the greater a range of people who come to see ballet, the better. Everyone should be allowed to share in these potentially very touching experiences.

 

Not to mention that I've discovered for me personally, focusing on what works for me rather than what doesn't has allowed me to remember every performance I've written about with a greater fondness than many of the performances I haven't reviewed - I think, because I see them in another light. I know this isn't the way for everyone, but it works for me, it probably also helps that there aren't any dancers at the company at all that I don't as such like to watch!

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Honestly, your discussion here applies to professional critics as well as everyone else -- whatever distinctions you want to draw between the reviews we read in the papers and the reviews we read here, we're all writing to share our interests, enthusiasms, and concerns.  We write to understand more clearly what we saw, and what we think about it. 

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