This is the first line of a recent piece in The New Yorker. For Joanne Imperio, Senior Photo Editor at The New Yorker, criticism “isn’t a hobby or a sideline or a way of sounding off. It’s a vocation, in the fullest sense, complete with deadlines and word counts and occasional moments of grace.”*
This is both true and not true for the dancers who write for Dancing Sydney. They do not, like those who write for The New Yorker, have to file on Tuesday. Timely-ness is not our intention or expectation—most things we ask them to write about have very short seasons so timeliness is not an issue. Their writing is also not a vocation, it’s a side hustle, and we don’t really pay attention to word count either. But we do hope for moments of grace in their writing.
We also encourage our (mostly) young writers to do other things that the New Yorker professionals apparently do: “attend not only to what something is but to what it almost is or might have been”. Like them, we encourage our writers to pay attention, as “really paying attention—is their stock-in-trade.”
As we move into spring and Dancing Sydney awakens from its winter hibernation we also agree with Imperio, that doing the above is “harder than it sounds.” These writers are asked to “linger” and sometimes to “poke”, to “turn things over like a suspect avocado.”
Some of these writers produce criticism, in its traditional form. Others report, profile, annotate the culture as it drifts by. Many do all of the above, sometimes in the same piece. […] What they don’t do is march in step. Some incline toward Olympian detachment, others missionary zeal. If they share anything, it’s a disposition: curious, alert, unsatisfied with the obvious, and mistrustful of what goes without saying.
And putting your hand up to be a critic “calls for nerve and an instinct for what deserves scrutiny and what’s better left alone.”
It’s easy to skim culture, to riff, to slot things into trend pieces. It’s harder to look closely, think carefully, and say something illuminating. To name what hasn’t been named yet. To craft lines that echo in people’s heads, or get under their skin.
Our young dancing writers might not always manage this, but Dancing Sydney hopes you enjoy reading them try.
Look out for new writing on Happy Hour PLUS (ReadyMade Works at PACT), Catapult’s Outbound (also at PACT), on dancing at the Sydney Fringe, Sydney Dance Company’s INDance, and Dirty Feet’s Out of the Studio.
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* The New Yorker is sometimes hard to get for free. But you might be able to link to the whole piece @ The New Yorker, August 25, 2025, Portfolio. Critical Distance: Photography by Richard Renaldi.
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