Last week I went to Sadler's Wells to see some dance. Settling into the first row of the orchestra, squinting down at the stage, I became aware of a familiar feeling. I didn't know what I was seeing.
Partly, it must be said, this was because I had turned up late, let my friend book the tickets, forgotten to look it up before I left the office and didn't get a programme. You might accuse me of laziness, or give me points for rigorous purity of experience - take your pick.
But I didn't know what I was seeing on a more fundamental level as well. I always think: "I know there are subtleties in this that I should be appreciating but, somehow, I just don't." It isn't that I don't want to - but I'm increasingly aware that there's limited space in my brain-pan, and limited time, and there are many, many other things I ought to know too.
And there's also a stubborn part of me that insists I shouldn't have to know all these things, that I should be able to watch something and just KNOW it's good. It is possible. I have been transported by modern dance: Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Canadian dancer Peggy Baker, most recently Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Antony Gormley's Zero Degrees. I've got on quite well with ballet, too, though I must admit to a no-doubt vulgar liking for the more spectacular bits - the lifts and spins and leaps.
My test is simple: does it move me? Make me laugh or forget to breathe? I am happy to watch total stillness - the difference between "just fine" and "great" being, perhaps, not in a work's sense of bustle but in its quality of attention, the focus of unspoken meaning.
But then the self-doubt creeps in. Maybe I'm totally wrong; somebody else, who knows more, must necessarily be more right. So then I read the reviews. The Guardian's Judith Mackrell reviewed Rosas's D'un Soir un Jour, while I saw their Bartok/Beethoven/Schoenberg repertory evening. She saw that the evening "starts out brilliantly, with a silent homage to Nijinsky's original setting of Debussy's L'apres-midi d'un faune ... [then succumbs to] empty stretches of choreographic doodling"; I saw a leadenness. I saw the way one dancer's legs didn't seem to go quite high enough; the way their bodies were bendy - but not quite bendy enough; the way that no one dancer made that fierce connection to the audience that can be so thrilling.
Finally I concluded that I was underwhelmed. She gave it two stars. Different routes, similar conclusion.
I am aware that this is all just another way of saying I don't know anything about art, but know what I like - the hoariest of hoary cliches. But can't that be OK, sometimes?
