Confessions of a Crabby Critic
This article was written for Volume One of DANCE INK, its first issue ever, May/June 1990. It was subsequently reprinted often in other publications.
If you’ve read a fair sampling of the reviews on this site, you’ll see how rarely Burt is “intolerant” of “work that is inept or naive” - and how often he found work “that stand[s] up to competition with the very best and worst of life. The accompanying photo is courtesy of Lois Greenfield. |
The Wrong Side of the Bed: Confessions of a Crabby Critic
It’s not cricket for critics to complain. We don’t have a harder time than dancers or choreographers, even if the money we generally earn is in the same pitiful range. True, we all see much more mediocre or incompetent work than we’d like, but then there has to be a great quantity of such work at all levels if there is also to be choreography worth admiring. Nothing is harder to create than a really good dance. Despite our whining and groaning, and in the midst of the putdowns we may trade in the lobby, we still know that.
Dance critics aren’t detached observers inured to disappointment; we’re passionate, prejudiced advocates with great expectations. When you see too much unrelievedly bad or dull work and write too many consistently unkind but serious reviews, it’s difficult not to feel like a bad person. On the other hand, a piece of savagely humorous writing - something punishing - lifts the spirits. You feel that you’ve dispensed justice, that rare commodity. And readers love it.
A critic’s strength fluctuates like anyone else’s. You try to keep up with everything, to be fully responsible, but this is impossible. Years ago, I was seeing too many concerts each week. I was frazzled by trying to take in too much, and having my personal life atrophy, and felt guilty at my failure to meet my obligations to the field. Then Tobi Tobias remarked that, of course, it was impossible to keep up. What a relief! But periodically, the pace accelerates and you try obsessively to cram everything in.
Of course, some critics thrive on going to performances nearly every night: they can see half a dozen concerts in one weekend. Not me. Dance is not my whole life. Usually, if I go to more than two or three performances a week, even if I go to some just for the pleasure of it, I begin to think I hate dance. Weekends, I get out of town unless the weather makes it too horrendous to drive, or gloomy skies and minus-forty-degree windchills make being in the country unappealing. This double life keeps me relatively sane, or so I imagine. If I stick around I wind up going to a couple of performances. This is work, and makes every day of the week identical.
When you’re young, it’s acceptable, and hopefully temporary, to work a couple of jobs, rehearse and perform, stay up late winding down. At forty-nine, I’m not willing to spend all day at the office, spend nights out, eat dinner at eleven, steal hours here and there to write about what I’ve seen. I want to spend some time at home doing nothing, playing opera or zydeco on the hi-fi, reading a spy book, and keeping an eye on some dumb program on the TV with the sound off. I want to go out to dinner with pals and not have to jump up and run off to a performance just when we’re getting mellow. I want to have a good time, and I expect dance to help satisfy that desire. Once I despised the middle-aged people who complained about sitting on the floor, even on cushions. Now I’m one of them. I need a comfortable seat for my tush, decent back support, and a reasonably unobstructed view if I’m going to give a performance the attention it may merit. But I want an escape hatch, too. If I hate a program, I want to be able to slip out without parading in front of the audience and the performers. I’m not willing to be tortured, however unintentionally.
Work that is raw and unfinished often appeals to me. But a surprising number of concerts to which critics are invited are far from ready for professional criticism or review. Certainly, choreographers need to show their work to a public, to people other than their friends and supporters; often that’s the only way to find out what works and what doesn’t. But when a critic is seduced by hype to attend a performance of truly naive or inept work, he or she isn’t likely to return to see another piece by that choreographer for a long time.
While it is essential for a choreographer to have been a dancer, choreographing is a very different kind of skill, and not every dancer has a feeling for it; nor does every person who choreographs a few dances have the talent and imagination and stamina to continue. At the same time, there’s a sense in the modern/postmodern dance world that one naturally steps up from being a dancer to being a choreographer. And the venturesomeness, and confidence of dancers who stretch into composition is one of the elements that make American modern dance lively and inventive. A lack of that strength and mental vigor is one of the reasons why ballet has become so nearly moribund.
But it is maddening to observe choreographers who don’t seem to have any reason to choreograph except that they have acquired a measure of the skill in making steps and moving people around. They think they ought to be making dances, so they do so despite having nothing to say. Some seem incapable of learning from their own work. For these choreographers, above all, my patience has snapped.
I wasn’t always this intolerant. My inclination is to be supportive. But when my lover became sick with AIDS, requiring nearly constant attention because of his physical weakness and emotional distress, time away from him became precious. I had to steal time from him to go to the office. I went to one performance a week and wrote about it, whatever it was. Those few hours represented the only time I spent absorbed in something of my own. The private activity kept me sane.
Works that seemed pointless or witless or lazy infuriated me. I didn’t expect everything to be good - that would have been idiotic. But I did expect, and demand, that a choreographer not be just jerking him- or herself off and jerking me around. I expected that he or she had a specific intention and a hard idea of what he or she was doing, an idea that was reasonably close to reality, and subject matter that was worth the trouble. Having my time wasted was not something I could shrug off. Every performance was balanced against my lover’s pain or need. Now, more and more this seems to me a legitimate attitude. Dance isn’t competing only with other leisure time activities; it must stand up to competition with the very best and worst of life.
Dancers and choreographers expect from us what we expect from them: vision and clarity. Many want their work discussed in terms of the history of the art and the output of the choreographer as well as in a contemporary cultural context. Few writers have the space to do this in more than a cursory way. Writers and editors have to fight for space. Newspapers and magazines truthfully reflect American culture in their essential indifference to the arts, except for media stars and those arts capable of bringing in commercial revenues.
Part of the desire on the part of dancers and choreographers, I think, is to elevate the status of dance in artistic discourse. This is probably a good idea for lots of reasons - money being only one. But as it happens, it’s a job I’d rather leave to others who are better at nailing down influences, drawing parallels with other fields, and noting trends. I don’t believe that abstractions and generalities are more meaningful than specific details. I don’t care deeply about trends. I’m most interested in the immediate event of a particular evening: what I saw, how that struck me, how and why it worked or didn’t. I don’t want to pull away from an event, to experience it remotely. If I can be touched, I want to be. I care about the instance I observe, not about what I’m supposed to have seen. I don’t try to neutralize the specific baggage I, like any audience member, bring to a performance. Whatever objectivity I have comes from being involved in dance since the early sixties, and from looking at a hell of a lot of it.
People want and deserve credit for their accomplishments but I’m probably not the person who’ll see they get their due. I don’t necessarily care who thought of something first and stamped their name on it. I’m not very interested in the windbag rhetoric that so brilliantly justifies tedious work by deflecting attention from what actually happens onstage. You don’t have to be anti-intellectual to glaze over when you hear words like “semiotics” and “deconstruction”.
Unfortunately, a critic is very much of his or her time. We usually have the closest affinity for work we were drawn to early on, work that embodied our own questions and that we had to wrestle with in forming our own ideas and standards. It can be uncomfortable to yield to an alien sensibility, particularly the kind that yanks our certainties out from under us. It can be hard to not automatically subject new work to the strictures of the old; it is sometimes unclear whether familiar standards are appropriate. I’m not thinking of a set of mental rules. But we may find ourselves unable to experience a work directly. We hold it at bay and it filters into us piecemeal through our objections. Is that because the work is lousy or because it is foreign to our taste?
What is taste, anyway? And how can we learn to go beyond our particular preferences? Is it worthwhile struggling to be more inclusive and more catholic? I think it is essential to admit that all is not known, that creation is an ongoing process, and that we can continue to learn. And if everything we see is crap? If that’s so, we can make that judgment but we ought still look in a reasonably open-hearted, open-minded way. Maybe our opinions aren’t always of primary importance. What’s crucial is to keep our perceptions open and our evaluations flexible. The choreographer’s task is to give body to an idea. And when we pick that matter apart, however delicate the surgery, we risk denying it its measure of truth.
We must believe our eyes. We need to look at dances in the context of our whole experience. Yet we must try, too, to see the work as a thing in itself, on its own terms as something possibly new, full of tender potential. We must see it in relation to the past, as an expression of the present moment, as a gesture toward an unknown future.
Dance critics aren’t detached observers inured to disappointment; we’re passionate, prejudiced advocates with great expectations. When you see too much unrelievedly bad or dull work and write too many consistently unkind but serious reviews, it’s difficult not to feel like a bad person. On the other hand, a piece of savagely humorous writing - something punishing - lifts the spirits. You feel that you’ve dispensed justice, that rare commodity. And readers love it.
A critic’s strength fluctuates like anyone else’s. You try to keep up with everything, to be fully responsible, but this is impossible. Years ago, I was seeing too many concerts each week. I was frazzled by trying to take in too much, and having my personal life atrophy, and felt guilty at my failure to meet my obligations to the field. Then Tobi Tobias remarked that, of course, it was impossible to keep up. What a relief! But periodically, the pace accelerates and you try obsessively to cram everything in.
Of course, some critics thrive on going to performances nearly every night: they can see half a dozen concerts in one weekend. Not me. Dance is not my whole life. Usually, if I go to more than two or three performances a week, even if I go to some just for the pleasure of it, I begin to think I hate dance. Weekends, I get out of town unless the weather makes it too horrendous to drive, or gloomy skies and minus-forty-degree windchills make being in the country unappealing. This double life keeps me relatively sane, or so I imagine. If I stick around I wind up going to a couple of performances. This is work, and makes every day of the week identical.
When you’re young, it’s acceptable, and hopefully temporary, to work a couple of jobs, rehearse and perform, stay up late winding down. At forty-nine, I’m not willing to spend all day at the office, spend nights out, eat dinner at eleven, steal hours here and there to write about what I’ve seen. I want to spend some time at home doing nothing, playing opera or zydeco on the hi-fi, reading a spy book, and keeping an eye on some dumb program on the TV with the sound off. I want to go out to dinner with pals and not have to jump up and run off to a performance just when we’re getting mellow. I want to have a good time, and I expect dance to help satisfy that desire. Once I despised the middle-aged people who complained about sitting on the floor, even on cushions. Now I’m one of them. I need a comfortable seat for my tush, decent back support, and a reasonably unobstructed view if I’m going to give a performance the attention it may merit. But I want an escape hatch, too. If I hate a program, I want to be able to slip out without parading in front of the audience and the performers. I’m not willing to be tortured, however unintentionally.
Work that is raw and unfinished often appeals to me. But a surprising number of concerts to which critics are invited are far from ready for professional criticism or review. Certainly, choreographers need to show their work to a public, to people other than their friends and supporters; often that’s the only way to find out what works and what doesn’t. But when a critic is seduced by hype to attend a performance of truly naive or inept work, he or she isn’t likely to return to see another piece by that choreographer for a long time.
While it is essential for a choreographer to have been a dancer, choreographing is a very different kind of skill, and not every dancer has a feeling for it; nor does every person who choreographs a few dances have the talent and imagination and stamina to continue. At the same time, there’s a sense in the modern/postmodern dance world that one naturally steps up from being a dancer to being a choreographer. And the venturesomeness, and confidence of dancers who stretch into composition is one of the elements that make American modern dance lively and inventive. A lack of that strength and mental vigor is one of the reasons why ballet has become so nearly moribund.
But it is maddening to observe choreographers who don’t seem to have any reason to choreograph except that they have acquired a measure of the skill in making steps and moving people around. They think they ought to be making dances, so they do so despite having nothing to say. Some seem incapable of learning from their own work. For these choreographers, above all, my patience has snapped.
I wasn’t always this intolerant. My inclination is to be supportive. But when my lover became sick with AIDS, requiring nearly constant attention because of his physical weakness and emotional distress, time away from him became precious. I had to steal time from him to go to the office. I went to one performance a week and wrote about it, whatever it was. Those few hours represented the only time I spent absorbed in something of my own. The private activity kept me sane.
Works that seemed pointless or witless or lazy infuriated me. I didn’t expect everything to be good - that would have been idiotic. But I did expect, and demand, that a choreographer not be just jerking him- or herself off and jerking me around. I expected that he or she had a specific intention and a hard idea of what he or she was doing, an idea that was reasonably close to reality, and subject matter that was worth the trouble. Having my time wasted was not something I could shrug off. Every performance was balanced against my lover’s pain or need. Now, more and more this seems to me a legitimate attitude. Dance isn’t competing only with other leisure time activities; it must stand up to competition with the very best and worst of life.
Dancers and choreographers expect from us what we expect from them: vision and clarity. Many want their work discussed in terms of the history of the art and the output of the choreographer as well as in a contemporary cultural context. Few writers have the space to do this in more than a cursory way. Writers and editors have to fight for space. Newspapers and magazines truthfully reflect American culture in their essential indifference to the arts, except for media stars and those arts capable of bringing in commercial revenues.
Part of the desire on the part of dancers and choreographers, I think, is to elevate the status of dance in artistic discourse. This is probably a good idea for lots of reasons - money being only one. But as it happens, it’s a job I’d rather leave to others who are better at nailing down influences, drawing parallels with other fields, and noting trends. I don’t believe that abstractions and generalities are more meaningful than specific details. I don’t care deeply about trends. I’m most interested in the immediate event of a particular evening: what I saw, how that struck me, how and why it worked or didn’t. I don’t want to pull away from an event, to experience it remotely. If I can be touched, I want to be. I care about the instance I observe, not about what I’m supposed to have seen. I don’t try to neutralize the specific baggage I, like any audience member, bring to a performance. Whatever objectivity I have comes from being involved in dance since the early sixties, and from looking at a hell of a lot of it.
People want and deserve credit for their accomplishments but I’m probably not the person who’ll see they get their due. I don’t necessarily care who thought of something first and stamped their name on it. I’m not very interested in the windbag rhetoric that so brilliantly justifies tedious work by deflecting attention from what actually happens onstage. You don’t have to be anti-intellectual to glaze over when you hear words like “semiotics” and “deconstruction”.
Unfortunately, a critic is very much of his or her time. We usually have the closest affinity for work we were drawn to early on, work that embodied our own questions and that we had to wrestle with in forming our own ideas and standards. It can be uncomfortable to yield to an alien sensibility, particularly the kind that yanks our certainties out from under us. It can be hard to not automatically subject new work to the strictures of the old; it is sometimes unclear whether familiar standards are appropriate. I’m not thinking of a set of mental rules. But we may find ourselves unable to experience a work directly. We hold it at bay and it filters into us piecemeal through our objections. Is that because the work is lousy or because it is foreign to our taste?
What is taste, anyway? And how can we learn to go beyond our particular preferences? Is it worthwhile struggling to be more inclusive and more catholic? I think it is essential to admit that all is not known, that creation is an ongoing process, and that we can continue to learn. And if everything we see is crap? If that’s so, we can make that judgment but we ought still look in a reasonably open-hearted, open-minded way. Maybe our opinions aren’t always of primary importance. What’s crucial is to keep our perceptions open and our evaluations flexible. The choreographer’s task is to give body to an idea. And when we pick that matter apart, however delicate the surgery, we risk denying it its measure of truth.
We must believe our eyes. We need to look at dances in the context of our whole experience. Yet we must try, too, to see the work as a thing in itself, on its own terms as something possibly new, full of tender potential. We must see it in relation to the past, as an expression of the present moment, as a gesture toward an unknown future.