Clement Crisp's Forsythe review has finally made it into print and it's predictably chilly. Publication of his reviews, I've noticed, is increasingly delayed. The FT arts editor, I sense, has the same problem as I have at The Tablet: too little space - and dance not a main priority.
I wonder how long dance reviewing will survive in the British dailies. Little of it can make sense other than to a dance audience. Reviews in other arts are more likely to be anchored in a strong point of view (and with fewer hedged bets) and to be accessible to readers who don't follow the art form in question closely. For dance critics, the damnatios of interval chat all too often mutate into tedious equivocations at home and in front of a keyboard (A shining exception - Jane Simpson: the only writer who makes me think 'how did I miss that?', or 'I wish I had said that').
If dance criticism is to continue to make it into the arts pages, it has (in addition to saying something about the dance per se) to have wit (as Crisp has), literary quality, and a sense of connectedness to the wider world. You get it in, say, Richard Buckle's writing, which is not only about dance, but also mirrors the society in which he moved.
Most newspaper reviews have at some level to address the questions: (i) Is this any good? (ii) why does it matter? (iii) why should I care?. The issue of good writing is even more important with an art form that, for most, is in peripheral vision. Especially when, for as long as the dailies publish reviews, what's written about dance is more visible to more people than the dance itself.
2 comments:
Believe it or not, Brendan, the situation in NYC is more dire. Of the three main dialies, the Times has the most coverage, and it can be discussed. The Post has occasional briefs by Clive Barnes, I don't know if the Daily News reports on dance at all. The smaller papers (NY Newsday and NY Sun) are devoting more coverage to dance than any paper but the Times. At least in London, there are still more perspectives to read.
Leigh - I agree that it is more dire in NYC, with very little in the way of good writing to distinguish the Times' coverage.
On the situation here, my point is that dance writing for the newspapers needs to address (more clearly than it does) a non-dance audience - and not the 'internal forum' of the dance community.
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