Some links for Ann's students

In my posting yesterday, I said I would post some links. And here's one which caught my eye. The magazine Shakespeare at the Centre interviewed a group of critics, one of whom was Alastair Macaulay of the Financial Times (he writes about theatre and dance). I was very struck by what he said about how he got started:

"In my teens, I got into the habit of writing to friends, long and frequent letters about stage performances I saw. When I was twenty, two things happened (i) I fell in love with ballet, so that many of my letters started to be about that and (ii) during my final term at Cambridge I played the leading role in a play to such success that I thought I wanted to become an actor. My family put me off becoming an actor, but the friends who read my letters kept encouraging me to become a dance critic. It took two years before I began to take them seriously. I happened to get a break as a dance critic in 1978 when I was twenty-two. Only once I had started did I suddenly realise how fulfilling it could be – how it fulfilled all the enthusiasm and analysis I had been putting into the letters."

LINK

Here's something timely. You might be interested in a blog by a New York newspaper critic, Apollinaire Scherr. If you scroll down to the postings on 9 November 2006, you'll see contributions to Scherr's blog by from several critics about what they write and why. For instance, here's what Rachel Howard says. She writes for the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Lately, I've been trying to write my reviews as if talking about last night's show to a random person at the office. And if I went on and on to a random person at the office about what the movement looked like, even in the most poetic terms, their eyes would be glazing over within ten seconds. So why would we assume anyone would want to read that?"

LINK

Even here in Britain, you find professional dance writers beginning to blog. The Guardian newspaper's arts website is way ahead of the rest. Here's the Observer's dance critic, Luke Jennings' latest posting:

"I was talking to a publisher recently about a book on contemporary dance. The problem was: what to call it. The expression "contemporary dance" was, she said, such a turn-off - so arid, passionless, and redolent of pretension - that no one would ever buy a book with those words on the cover. And "modern dance"? Even worse. The problem was apparently insurmountable."

LINK

Jennings is keen to engage with anyone who cares to comment on his posts, as you can see.


Here's a rather dense piece by Diana Theodores, another critic. A long article and, frankly, a bit of a struggle. But her first paragraph is worth thinking about:

"Criticism aims to create a fuller aesthetic experience of a work of art. Good criticism illuminates one’s sensibilities and promotes the understanding of the specific art form experienced. In discussing criticism, Eliot has stated that the most important trait in a critic is a “highly developed sense of fact.” This sense of fact is manifested differently depending upon the object of criticism. For a dance critic it particularly embodies precise, objective observation and refined memory. The ephemerality of dance adds to the complexity of dance criticism — along with the difficulty of invoking three dimensional moving images — and it has relied more on a total, immediate apprehension than criticism of other art forms. Literary criticism is conducted in the same medium as the art object, and music, dramatic and fine art criticism also have technical advantages over dance criticism. This may change with developments in notation and video, but the printed page will surely remain the principal means of communicating criticism for some time."

LINK

And you have to read this - it's great fun. One critic interviewed by another; Clement Crisp of the Financial Times, the doyen of London's dance critics, talked to Ismene Brown of the Telegraph for the Ballet.co website several years ago.

"Crisp commands English like a maestro controlling a vast orchestra of thousands upon thousands of instruments, some splendidly abstruse. Readers scurry to their dictionaries. Ballet, which of all the performing arts offers the highest challenge to any attempt to express it in words, has produced a tiny handful of star writers able to match the brilliance of the achievements they saw on stage with their own verbal artistry. Edwin Denby, Arlene Croce, Richard Buckle and Clement Crisp are critics whose criticism lives an independent life as wonderful pieces of writing (whether you trust their contents or not), the virtuosity underpinned by the seething passion and important knowledge with which they form their judgments. Newspaper English is nowadays more functional than stylish, but Crisp keeps style alive, prodding language insistently with everything from brutality to decorative hyperbole, as if English were a sluggard that would never get out of bed if he did not lash it with his borborygms and Teasmades."

LINK

And here's another interview with a dance critic, this time with Judith Mackrell of The Guardian. The interview was done in 1999. Here's an excerpt.

"When Mackrell first started she used to take notes during the performance “.. but I soon realised that that was self-defeating because I couldn't read my handwriting afterwards anyway - I have terrible writing. It's just totally indecipherable!”. Tricky indeed. Now she takes odd notes if she is doing a long review (that would be 2,000 words typically) or for an overnight review, of which more later. For her ‘normal’ reviews, of 400-500 words, she finds she remembers the key images - like taking a mental snapshot almost. Then “I get up the next morning, take the children to school and then just write it.”

LINK

I'll add further links here, rather than create a new posting everytime if that's OK!