'Rehabilitating Dance Criticism', Dance Theatre Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, 2002

Righting Dance: Writing Dancing, Cork: Firkin Crane Press, 2000

'Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page,' Performance Research, Spring 2000 (Book review

'Choreographing the Question: A Dramaturg and Choreographer in Dialogue,' Momentum: Dance-Theatre: An International Investigation, Manchester Metropolitan University, September 1999 (Proceedings)

First We Take Manhattan: Four American Women and the New York School of Dance Criticism, Amsterdam/London/Toronto, Harwood Academic Publishers/Gordon and Breach, March 1996.

'Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power', Performance Research, vol. 1, no. 2, Spring 1996 (Book review)

'A Decade of Dance in Ireland: A Critic's Perspective', Dance Chronicle, Spring/Summer 1996

'New Directions in Choreography and Directing', in Taken at the Flood - Art in our times, Berlin, ELIA Conference, June 1995 (Proceedings)

'Formalist and Feminine: The New York School', Dance Theatre Journal, December 1995

'Goodbye To All That', Dance Ireland, vol. 7 no. 3, Autumn 1994 (Finola Cronin's final performances with the Pina Baush Company)

'Laban for Actors and Dancers', Theatre Research International, Spring 1994 (Book review)

'A Tribute to Four American Dance Critics', Dance Critics Association News, Spring 1993

'Vaslav Njinsky: The Artist and The Dancer', published notes for Dance Strokes/Images of Nijinsky, The RHA Gallagher Gallery, The Dublin Theatre Festival, Autumn 1990

Dance Spectrum: Critical and Philosophical Enquiry, Diana Theodores (ed.), Waterloo, Ontario; Otium Press, and Trinity, Dublin: Parsons Press, 1982

'Towards Method in Dance Criticism', in Dance Spectrum: Critical and Philosophical Enquiry, Diana Theodores Taplin (ed.), University of Waterloo, Otium Publications and Parsons Press, 1982

New Directions in Dance (Proceedings from the Seventh Dance in Canada Conference), ed. Diana Theodores, Oxford and Toronto, Pergamon Press, 1979

'On Critics and Criticism of Dance', in New Directions in Dance, Diana Theodores Taplin (ed.), Toronto and Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979

Over 250 articles, reviews as a Dance and Theatre Critic for The Sunday Tribune1984-1992

Articles also published in The Guardian (London), In Dublin, Hot Press (Dublin), Dance in Canada Magazine, Dance Ireland Magazine, Dance News and Choreographers and Composers Review (New York)

Dance and Theatre review broadcasts for 'Arts in Perspective' on T.V. Ontario (Canada) and for 'Arts in Review' and 'Arts Express', RTE Ireland and BBC Northern Ireland 1979-1989

As a young dancer in New York in the late Sixties and early Seventies a palette of physical sensations were etched into my body memory. I remember the voluptuous flow of Limon classes, the silent terror of Merce's classes, the abdominal endurance of Bella Lewitzsky's classes and the competitive dramas of every Graham class, guts hollowed out in the pursuit of contractions and spirals. I remember the cool, cerebral, articulate and precise adagios of Sandra Neal's Cunningham classes as she talked us through the moment-to-moment of effort and muscle mapping within each phrase. I remember Maggie Black's star studded ballet classes and how she wouldn't allow me to jump because she said I wasn't working from a deep enough plie. I remember trying too hard. Always trying too hard….

And then, in 1972, I was on a subway in New York City with a copy of Marcia Siegel's At The Vanishing Point hot off the press. I read it from cover to cover with that riveted attention and suspension in time that one reads a compelling novel. "When the curtain opens we see…" went the refrain; "The dance is about…" said each review with clarity and tension. Here was a dance critic and master story teller at work. The notion of dance writing as story telling resonated within my imagination and it has remained with me to this day in 2002 as I try to reconcile my career in dance criticism with my turning point as a fiction writer. For me the labors of the studio effortlessly yielded to the word life of dances after that revelatory reading and dance criticism - in a wide range of forms and media - has been my story, my single-most sustained narrative.

From academic and journalistic dance writings in journals and conference proceedings, research for television dance documentaries and television arts programs, reviewing in New York and Toronto, to writing the first nationally established dance column in Ireland from 1984-1992 and a few books along the way my "critical practice" embraces:

the publication of dance criticism

the documentation of choreographic process.

interviews and dialogues with and about choreographers located within a wide range of approaches and contexts.

the ongoing project of revising the critical dialogue between choreographers and critics via the organising of symposia, workshops and conferences. These documented activities create shared spaces in which the languages of the studio (choreographic process), the academy (critical theories on dance) and the media (print and broadcast reviewing) can interrogate each other more productively, where a dramaturgy of spectatorship and attention to dance can be investigated further and in which choreographers and writers can observe and access relationships between the physical acts of writing and choreographing.

Stories are my obsession: the stories of dances, body stories from the studio, the stories of choreographic process, stories about characters who inhabit worlds of dance, and the stories of acts of criticism themselves.