Which leaves very few publications with house critics and editors who are dedicated to the art form. Today there are only two full-time dance critics in the country: Alastair Macaulay of The New York Times and Sarah Kaufman of The Washington Post. Some freelancers continue to publish reviews, but more likely than not the space for this kind of writing has been cut significantly. One could argue that though this trend is unfortunate, it’s almost expected given that dance concerts cater to small audiences, and the constituency reading about them tends to be even smaller still. But for a medium that can be difficult to understand, generalist coverage remains vital to the accessibility of the dance scene.

As Deborah Jowitt, the former Village Voice critic, put it: “If art is valuable as a reflection—of a time, of a place, of a creation—then dance is just as important as literature or film, even though the audience for it is smaller.” And because critics ask choreographers and dancers to appraise their work from a different perspective, pointing out the strengths and flaws in their blind spots, their decline is also a blow to the art form itself.

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A look at history can offer insight into why dance is having a harder time than other art forms. “Dance is the least respected of the fine arts,” said Joan Acocella, The New Yorker's dance critic. “That's been the case ever since the fourth century when the church took over the arts and banished dance from public religious ceremonies.” The physicality of the medium and its associations with sexuality and femininity meant that through the early part of the 20th century, dance received little attention in the press. When it did, the reviewers were music or theater critics who went to the ballet reluctantly, and when they wrote about it they did so by ignoring the dance itself.

The U.S got its first dance-exclusive critic in 1927, when John Martin joined the staff of The New York Times. His visual sensitivity alerted readers to the significance of what was happening onstage, and by doing so he greatly expanded the viewership of dance, and modern dance in particular. People would not remember Martha Graham the way they do now if it hadn’t been for Martin. Still, the stigma persisted. Robert Greskovic, who covers dance for The Wall Street Journal, told me that when the former New Yorker critic Arlene Croce first started writing about ballet, another writer likened her aspirations to “being serious about candy.”

During the 1960s and 1970s America came under the influence of the “dance boom,” in which a rash of dance companies flourished with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and a culture-hungry middle class. The sexual revolution brought about an era in which “we were all in love with our own physicality,” said Elizabeth Zimmer, a former dance critic at The Village Voice. Dance allowed the body to come into full and fleshed-out consciousness. And by sheer chance this happened to be one of the most innovative periods in the history of choreography. George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins pushed the avant-garde of ballet, while the post-modernists of Judson Dance Theater turned the medium on its head with pedestrian movements (sitting, walking, running) that didn’t look like dance at all. Some of the most influential artists of the 20th century—Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown—were working at this time.