Moving passages.(Notes & comments: June 2006)

Regular readers will know that we are fond of T. S. Eliot's definition of criticism as "the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste." Those tasks are a large part of what The New Criterion is about, and we are grateful to be able to offer regular examples of such criticism in many areas of cultural endeavor, from fiction and poetry to the visual arts, theater, music, and the dance. The impending publication of Laura Jacobs's Landscape with Moving Figures: A Decade on Dance (Dance and Movement Press) provides a sterling instance of what we mean. Laura has been the dance critic of The New Criterion since 1994. In that time, she has distinguished herself as the best in the business. She has an uncanny talent for communicating the substance--the feel, the texture, the physical presence--of the dancer's art. It's not just that she was trained as a dancer herself--other dance critics are. She infuses that firsthand knowledge with an unsurpassed ability to bring the reader into the heart, the engine-room of dance. Consider, to take just one example, ...