The ORDER Process

Use the ORDER Process to see and critique dance. The ORDER approach facilitates critical
thinking skills.

Critical Evaluation involves verbally describing, analyzing, interpreting, and judging works
(Lavender 1).

Observation of the dance

Reflection on the experience of having seen the dance
Discussion verbal sharing of one’s reflective description and analysis of the dance
Evaluation
Revision (Recommendations for revisions used in choreography not in criticism)

A key element of the ORDER approach is the reflective writing stage, a precursor to the group
discussion stage. Stimulates an even greater perceptiveness and clarity of thought than
impromptu discussion. This is because the act of writing involves three separate modes of
learning: doing, seeing, and verbalizing. Reflective writing precedes discussion of students’
reaction to each dance (Lavender 6).

The 5 teaching/learning principles upon which the ORDER approach is based are (Lavender 59):

1. Subjective, or feeling-based, responses play only a preliminary role in the critical

response, and they must not be considered as sufficient basis for making aesthetic
judgments because they describe the viewer rather than the dance under review.
2. Critical judgements of a dance should not be based on predetermined criteria for artistic
excellence. Instead, they should be guided by the visible features of the dance and the
experience viewers have of those features and their relationships to each other.
3. Information about an artist’s intention or any external evidence about a work lies solely in
the capacity of such information to enhance one’s perception of the internal features of
the work.
4. The teacher’s voice should not be the only or the decisive critical voice in a class.
5. Each participant in critical discussion should be taught that offering criticism includes
expressing appreciation and praise.

Opposing point of view – Subjectivity

“Did you like it?” is the most crucial question to ask when judging dance. Jacqueline M. Smith
dance educator
Consider-
1. Works of art that some people despise but others adore must be both excellent and poor.
2. Works of art that arouse no emotions cannot be evaluated at all.
3. Works that were disliked before but are now loved must have been poor at one time, but
have somehow managed to become excellent.

Drawing on approaches to critical evaluation already in place in aesthetics and in philosophy

of art, the ORDER approach to critical evaluation is based on the idea that to respond
 critically to a dance or any work of art is to discuss it—to put into words one’s experience of
the work. Only through the clear articulation of one’s critical views can one accomplish the
fundamental aims of critical evaluation: to improve others’ ability both to see and to
appreciate the work under review. This means that to be a good critic one must both verbally
identify the visible properties of the work and make persuasive arguments for the meanings
and merits one finds in the work.

Obviously, the critical process is not simply one of delivering instant opinions about a work
of art. Instead the viewer must first focus on the work in a concentrated manner and, later,
engage in reflective consideration of the work’s aesthetic properties. Only then is one truly in
a position to engage in substantive critical discourse about the work (Lavender 3).

Whereas dance critic, Sally Banes in Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (1994)
delineates the critical operations as (Banes 25):

1. Description – What the dancers did and what does the work look and feel like?
2. Interpretation
3. Evaluation
4. Contextualization—Contextual Explanation

For the critic’s job is to complete the work in the reader’s understanding, to unfold the work in an
extended time and space after the performance, and to enrich the experience of the work. This
may be done, of course, even for those who have not seen the work (Banes 25).

Sources:

Sally Banes in Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (1994)

Lavender, Larry. Dancers Talking Dance: Critical Evaluation in the Choreography Class. Human
Kinetics, 1996.