What is a critic or historian to do when faced with the obvious embellishment of an artist's resume or, worse, the ongoing creation of a mythology that increases over the decades. What are the archival realities? And what of digitization of dance? While more critics and researchers demand online accessibility libraries are expending huge sums to keep up with expectations. Who decides which materials will be digitized? The librarians? The historians? The companies? The individuals? Will "bad histories" be written if we rely only on digitized materials? With the introduction of online resources such as YouTube, Wikipedia and blogs, how do we uncover the "truth"? Where can the critic stand in this shifting landscape?

Elizabeth Aldrich, internationally known for her work in period dance, has provided choreography for nine feature films, including The Age of Innocence, The Remains of the Day and The Haunted Mansion. Her extensive writings on dance include From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in 19th-Century Dance (Northwestern University Press, 1991); "Introduction," in International Encyclopedia of Dance (Oxford University Press, 1998); "Documentation, Preservation, and Access: Ensuring a Future for Dance's Legacy," and "Elegant Recreation: American Social Dance, 1769-1890," in The Social and Popular Dance Reader (edited by Julie Malnig, University of Illinois Press, forthcoming). Aldrich was responsible for the Library of Congress's American Memory Internet project, An American Ballroom Companion, c.1490-1920 and served as project director for the Library's Katherine Dunham website. Executive director of the Dance Heritage Coalition for seven years, Aldrich was appointed Curator of Dance, Library of Congress in July 2006.

Marcea T. Daiter is a Certified Katherine Dunham Instructor, Pilates Mat Trainer, and a teacher of the Zena Rommett Floor Barre technique. Her field-study trips to Africa, Cuba, Mexico, the Caribbean, and in the United States to the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts, Humanities, and Intercultural Studies and to Jacob's Pillow have influenced her methodology and inspired her as an educator and choreographer. Currently she is an adjunct professor at New York University teaching African dance and Intercultural Studies; a full-time dance educator at Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts teaching modern, ballet, jazz, and Afro-Caribbean dance; and a dance teacher at StepsOnBroadway teaching Pilates, Zena Rommett Floor-Barre®, jazz and the Katherine Dunham technique.

Although Katherine Dunham has been celebrated for her choreography for Broadway revues, the concert stage, and cabaret, little attention has been paid to her choreography for film and to her work in Hollywood. Between 1939 and 1964, Dunham appeared in or worked on twelve movies; six — Pardon My Sarong (1942), Stormy Weather (1943), Casbah (1948), Mambo (1955), Green Mansions (1958), and The Bible (1964) — feature her choreography for the camera. Conyers will screen and comment on dance sequences from these films as well as from Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), which shows Dunham at her glamorous best.

Claude Conyers had a dual career as a professional ballet dancer and a publishing executive. Now retired, he is the founder of Hillbrow Publishing Services, specializing in scholarly and professional works in the humanities, the social sciences, and the performing arts. His web site can be seen at http://www.hillbrowpubserv.com.

Dunham's critical acumen as a chronicler of dance practice is noteworthy. Highly prolific, she provided crucial portrayals of dance in the Caribbean and the United States in contexts that ranged from the sacred to the Broadway stage. Three dance historians offer commentary and insight regarding her output and her prescient points of view that will be useful for dance critics working today.

Thomas F. DeFrantz attended Yale, CUNY, and NYU where he earned his PhD in Performance Studies. He has taught at Stanford, NYU, the Alvin Ailey School, and at MIT, where he is Associate Professor of Music and Theater Arts. In 2005 he designed the history and theory component of the American Dance Festival/Hollins University MFA Program, where he remains on the core faculty. His published work includes Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture (Oxford Press, 2004) and, in progress, "Black Beauty: Concert Dance in the Africanist Grain," a book-length manuscript exploring the choreography of Donald Byrd, Ulysses Dove, Bebe Miller, and Abdel Salaam. He writes the Book News column for DCA News.

Constance Valis Hill is a jazz dancer, choreographer and scholar of performance studies whose writings have appeared in Dance Magazine, Village Voice, Dance Research Journal and Studies in Dance History. Her essay, "Katherine Dunham's Southland: Protest in the Face of Repression," appears in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, ed. Thomas DeFrantz; "Cabin in the Sky: Katherine Dunham's and George Balanchine's (Afro) Americana" in Discourses in Dance. She was the SDHS volume editor for Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (2006). Her book, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (Oxford University Press, 2000) won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. She is the recipient of a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and is writing a cultural history of tap dancing in America since 1900. She has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and is a Five College Associate Professor of Dance at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Is the business of writing dance criticism getting harder as newspaper budgets contract and mostly unpaid web opportunities expand? Where does that leave the DCA? Last year we were asked for more time for our annual meeting. Here it is: a 100-minute block scheduled to gauge the interest and examine contributions DCA members can make to shaping an organization that represents and serves the interests of dance critics in the 21st century. If you are a DCA member, this meeting is for you to determine the organization's future. If you're not a member but have an interest in the viability of dance criticism, this conversation is for you as well. Please join us.

The DCA's illustrious panel answers the tough ethical questions dance critics face.

Mindy Aloff, moderator, is the author of Dance Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, 2006). Her reviews, essays and profiles on theatrical dancing and other cultural subjects have been published widely. An adjunct associate professor of dance at Barnard College, she is at work on Hippo in a Tutu, a study of the dance sources of historic Disney animated films, for Hyperion.

Randy Cohen's first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic, Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for "Late Night With David Letterman" for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on "TV Nation." He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it. Currently he writes "The Ethicist," a weekly column for the New York Times Magazine syndicated throughout the U.S. and Canada. He is a regular contributor to "Weekend All Things Considered" on National Public Radio.

Marvin Hoshino is an associate editor and the designer of Ballet Review, edited by Francis Mason and published by the Dance Research Foundation.

Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the City University of New York and the author of some twenty books. They include Charles Francis Adams (winner of the Bancroft Prize); James Russell Lowell (Finalist for the National Book Award), Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, Paul Robeson (winner of numerous prizes, including the New York Public Library's George Freedley Memorial Award for the best book of the year), Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, and the novel, Haymarket. Also a playwright, Duberman's first play, In White America, won the Vernon Rice/Drama Desk Award. His play on the life of Emma Goldman, Mother Earth, was recently showcased at the New York Theatre Workshop, and his play about the Beat generation, Visions of Kerouac has been widely produced.

Nancy Goldner's book on twenty ballets by George Balanchine, Balanchine Variations, will be published by the University Press of Florida this year. Goldner has written dance criticism for The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, Dance Now, Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications. She lectures across the United States under the auspices of The George Balanchine Foundation.

The DCA is most honored that David Vaughan has gracefully accepted its 7th Senior Critic's Honor this year. "I have always wanted to use the title of the song Laurel and Hardy sing and dance to in Way Out West: 'Commence to Dancing,'" David told us in deciding on a title for his remarks. We think that sounds perfect.

David Vaughan has danced, sung, acted, and choreographed in London, Paris, on and off Broadway, in American regional theaters, in film, television, ballet and modern dance companies, and cabaret. He is the archivist of the Cunningham Dance Foundation and the author of Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (Aperture, 1997) and Of Frederick Ashton and his Ballets (revised edition, Dance Books, 1999). He was a member of the editorial board of the International Encyclopedia of Dance (Oxford, 1998). At the Dancing in the Millennium Conference in Washington, D.C. in July 2000, he received the 2000 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research, and in September 2001 he received a New York Dance and Performance Award ("Bessie") for sustained achievement.

Robert A. Gottlieb, author of the biography George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, former editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf (where he edited Lincoln Kirstein's Nijinsky Dancing and The New York City Ballet) and former editor of The New Yorker, also programmed the New York City Ballet's performances for a decade. Gottlieb will discuss his experiences with Kirstein in conversation with critic Nancy Dalva.

Nancy Dalva is the senior writer for 2wice Magazine and has contributed to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, DanceView, Dance Magazine, The International Encyclopedia of Dance, and Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time (Richard Kostelantz, ed.), among other publications. She is the author of the texts for Dance Ink: Photographs and Dance 2wice.

Lincoln Kirstein was a man of wide interests, especially in the arts – poetry, painting, music, literature as well as dance. Our panelists will examine aspects of this remarkable man on the occasion of his centenary and the publication by Eakins Press of Lincoln Kirstein: A Bibliography of Published Writings and Lincoln Kirstein: the Program Notes.

George Dorris, the co-editor and co-founder (with Jack Anderson) of Dance Chronicle, contributes regularly to Ballet Review, Dance Now and The Dancing Times, and edited The Royal Swedish Ballet 1773-1998 (1999). He was an associate editor of The International Encyclopedia of Dance and a senior researcher on the Popular Balanchine Project of The Balanchine Foundation.

Randall Bourscheidt is president of the Alliance for the Arts, a non-profit arts advocacy organization in New York. His long-time professional involvement in the arts in New York has included serving as Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Affairs in the 1980s and as chairman of the New York City Advisory Commission for Cultural Affairs in the 1990s. A trustee of the George Balanchine Foundation, he has been the chairman of the committee for the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and a trustee of the City Center of Music and Drama. He is a member of the National Committee of Glimmerglass Opera and on the boards of Creative Time and Daniel and Some Super Friends, a dance company.

Peter Kayafas lives in New York City where he is the director of the Eakins Press Foundation, a not-for-profit publisher of exceptional books on art, photography, history, classical dance and literature. He has traveled and photographed extensively in the United States, Europe, Cuba and Romania and his photographs have been exhibited, published and collected widely. He is also an executive director of the Corporation of Yaddo, an adviser to the Committee for the Dance Collection at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts and a photography professor at Pratt Institute.

Robert Johnson helps us draw together the disparate threads we've unspooled on Kirstein, Dunham, and dance criticism. As we depart for our home cities, what have we learned that will be woven into our work as critics and dance writers?

Robert Johnson is staff dance critic for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., and reviews editor for Pointe magazine, based in New York City. He has written about dance for many publications, including daily papers, trade magazines and scholarly journals. He has taught and lectured on dance history and criticism. A member of the Dance Critics Association since the mid-1980s, Robert has served two terms on the board.