On May 6, 2012 during the dance critic seminar (at the Arts printing House, Vilnius) we, the team of DANCE.LV Journal asked the participants and also the leaders of the seminar to get involved in little unusual and playful project.  We told a little about history of dance criticism in Latvia and tried to search for the answers to questions – is the perfect review possible and what it has to contain to at least get close the perfect? One of the most important statements was that the best thing a writer can do is to really be there, to watch, to think and to try to do the best to get into the dance piece, i.e. to do the best to understand what it is he or she sees, why it is like it is, what and how it communicates and where it stands in sense of broader context. To demonstrate it on the spot three of us Dita Eglīte, Maija Treile and Inta Balode  performed a three minutes improvised dance piece speculatively called “Triadic Ballet of the Writers” and we framed is as if was reconstruction from something what might have happened in 60-ies or 70-ies in some underground venue at the time when only ballet was recognized as an official form of dance. And you should know that we can’t really dance, i.e. our dancing has nothing to do with professional dancing. Then we asked the participants to take 2 minutes to write a short quick review telling something about each of the performers. We were impressed and happy, and grateful for the reviews we got and it supported one of the hypothesis (which, of course, is wrong) that the worse the dancing is the better the reviews are. It also shows that it is so easy to make art work relevant through writing. And it also shows how much interesting and smart things come into writing when it gets created in playful situation.

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Inta Balode,* Madli Pesti,** Elena Slobodchikova***

It is hard not to be taken by New York. Every night there are hundreds of performances to choose from. Once the choice is made some generalizations about all New York performing arts arrive. Three of us visiting New York for just to mention some festivals – American Realness, Coil, Under the Radar, Live Artery – made a quick experiment. Some keywords related to the experiences got suggested and here are the first considerations written down mostly in the Train 7 going from Queens into Manhattan and back out. Texts are published as they were written. Others didn’t see colleagues writings before the experiment was finished.

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