As interest in the history of Russian ballet grows, it is logical – inevitable, one hopes – that Russian writers of a century ago who specialized in ballet be scrutinized ever more closely. Who were the ballet historians of the time? What were their credentials? their points of view? To consider just three – Alexander Pleshcheyev, Konstantin Skalkovsky and Sergei Khudekov – formidable names with reputations to match, is not to deny the importance of yet others who in many ways also deserve our attention. But there are good reasons to start with these three.

All were publitsisty or “publicists”, a useful if not precisely translatable term that connotes writers on current affairs, who went beyond regular journalism to compile histories of Russian ballet based in part on their long firsthand experience. None was a dancer or a historian by profession, so all came to ballet with a larger vision: ballet was a beloved avocation. This left them open to certain biases, but these do not detract substantially from their value as commentators on the scene. Indeed, their broader outlook is precisely what lends significance and credibility to their work. All were Petersburgers; their writings tell us little about the second imperial company in Moscow. All present to the modern scholar difficulties of access: the works of Pleshcheyev and Skalkovsky are preserved only in major western collections, and much of Khudekov's work is virtually unavailable outside the USSR.

In the West, the categories of music and dance are generally thought of as related, but distinct performing arts. Those of us who devote our time to studying and performing music often forget that no sound is produced without physical movement and that in most (if not all) cases performers have learned to move in certain ways in order to produce a desired pattern of sounds. Yet when we attend a piano recital we may very well enjoy the performance without actually seeing the pianist's fingers in motion on the keyboard. The movements of western “classical” musicians are, for the most part, aimed at producing sounds, and it is these sounds that the audience is expected to apprehend and appreciate aesthetically. In Okinawan “classical” music (koten ongaku), however, the “musical aesthetic” relies on a combination of formalized patterns of movement and sound, particularly in the playing of the two drums, collectively called tēku. The movements of the Okinawan drummer are thus more than a means to correct sound production they have aesthetic significance in their own right. Some of these movements, in fact, produce no sound at all. Others, though highly contrastive visually, may produce sounds which are acoustically the same.

Interplay of the visual and the aural is found in performance traditions around the globe. In East Asia alone there are numerous genres in which dancers sound drums – Japanese and Okinawan Ancestor Festival dances (bon-odori in Japan, eisā in Okinawa), the Korean “monk's drum” dances (puk-chum) and hourglass drum dances (sol-changgo), to name a few. In these dances, however, the “drummer” is more readily identifiable as a “dancer.” He or she moves through space; the striking of the drum is but one of the activities which the audience beholds and may not be the primary one. Usually these dances are accompanied by music performed by “non-dancing” musicians, whose ensemble may include drums other than those played by the dancing drummer.

Dance critics often use information external to a performance to identify and separately evaluate the creative aspects of dance (composition of music and movement; design of scenery and costumes) and the interpretive aspects (performance by dancers and musicians; execution of scenery and costume designs). Their evaluation may also take into account production factors not directly perceivable in a performance, including the type of floor, rehearsal time, illness, and injury.

These critical practices are problematic for an anti-geneticist theory of aesthetic value, the best-known of which is that of philosopher Monroe Beardsley. As a way of legislating against irresponsible criticism, such as describing Schubert's music as “pathetic” solely because one “sympathizes with his poverty,” Beardsley will “…count as characteristics of an aesthetic object [the proper object of criticism] no characteristics … that depend upon knowledge of their causal conditions, whether physical or psychological.” Even some who consider this position too strict, excluding as illegitimate certain important critical discourse, agree that it contributes to a desirable goal, the exclusion of “clearly irresponsible criticism,” or “‘fantastic’ criticism that finds in the work any property whatever suggested by biographical information.”

The apparent conflict between anti-geneticism and these critical practices in dance can be resolved by distinguishing evaluation of perceivable performances from assessments of the continuing skills of performing and creative artists.