The Atlantic on the "Death of the American Dance Critic"

[sandik]

This has been popping up all over my computer today, with some thoughtful commentary from various sources. As a critic, I'm not unbiased -- I think Mainwaring has touched on several important and frustrating points.

[Helene]

This has come up many times today for me, too, sent via social media and private email.

[volcanohunter]

I am a little confused by the excursion into the history of dance and dance criticism. Perhaps the dance writers on the board can help me out. The article states that "The physicality of the medium and its associations with sexuality and femininity meant that through the early part of the 20th century, dance received little attention in the press." Is this a reference primarily to the United States? I was under the impression that dance received a lot more press coverage in Europe, so it was, in fact, receiving attention.

I suppose I had assumed the reason dance had trouble being taken seriously as an art form was because its past was nearly impossible to study. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that 99%+ of all choreography ever created has been lost. This wouldn't have anything to do with religion, sex or women (the ballet of Louis XIV was initially exclusively male, after all), but with the problems associated with all movement notation systems, the fact that they are necessarily cumbersome, and that most dance practitioners remain illiterate. (Even a bad poet can jot down a very bad poem and put it in a shoebox, where it can be discovered centuries later.)

I'm sure I've written this before, but it has always bothered me that the Library of Congress classifies dance as a recreational activity and files it between darts and the circus, while music and the visual arts get letters all to themselves. But perhaps it is an accurate reflection of the value society attaches to dance.

[sandik]

I am a little confused by the excursion into the history of dance and dance criticism. Perhaps the dance writers on the board can help me out. The article states that "The physicality of the medium and its associations with sexuality and femininity meant that through the early part of the 20th century, dance received little attention in the press." Is this a reference primarily to the United States? I was under the impression that dance received a lot more press coverage in Europe, so it was, in fact, receiving attention.

The title of the article is "...death of the American dance critic," so it doesn't seem odd to me that most of the commentary is focus on the US. European dance writing has had a different arc than the work in the US, just as writing about theater, music and film have had. Dance writing in the US tracks along with the art form it discusses, and so flourished in the 1960-80s, just as dance itself did.

I suppose I had assumed the reason dance had trouble being taken seriously as an art form was because its past was nearly impossible to study. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that 99%+ of all choreography ever created has been lost. This wouldn't have anything to do with religion, sex or women (the ballet of Louis XIV was initially exclusively male, after all), but with the problems associated with all movement notation systems, the fact that they are necessarily cumbersome, and that most dance practitioners remain illiterate. (Even a bad poet can jot down a very bad poem and put it in a shoebox, where it can be discovered centuries later.)

There are a number of elements that make dance a difficult art form to analyze, especially in the past -- you've put your finger on a couple of the elements (lack of recorded materials and yes, gender issues) but there are other aspects that make the job a tricky one.

I'm sure I've written this before, but it has always bothered me that the Library of Congress classifies dance as a recreational activity and files it between darts and the circus, while music and the visual arts get letters all to themselves.

No argument from me!

But perhaps it is an accurate reflection of the value society attaches to dance.

Oh, I hope not.

[Helene]

The comments to the "Gawker" story referenced in the article are, sadly, indicative of the value society attaches to dance.

It's not just that the old history is difficult to mine: the current happenings are difficult as well, unless someone films a work and posts it to YouTube or the choreographer posts a film to his or her website, which is rare, aside from an excerpt or two. There are no scores or bad poetry or canvases to unearth and re-evaluate, and, as a result, maybe decide it wasn't so bad after all and was misinterpreted or undervalued in its own time.

[Helene]

Outgoing music critic Scott Cantrell (Dallas Morning News) and ArtsJournal's Douglas McLennan weighed in about music criticism and arts criticism in general for WQXR. There are highlights in print and a 17-minute audio that can be streamed and/or downloads:

http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/newspapers-cut-critics-dark-time-dawn-new-age/?%3A+This+Week+In+WQXR&mc_cid=24b68bb1fb&mc_eid=81482feaf0

[sandik]

It's not just that the old history is difficult to mine: the current happenings are difficult as well, unless someone films a work and posts it to YouTube or the choreographer posts a film to his or her website, which is rare, aside from an excerpt or two. There are no scores or bad poetry or canvases to unearth and re-evaluate, and, as a result, maybe decide it wasn't so bad after all and was misinterpreted or undervalued in its own time.

I have to say that, when I was teaching dance history more frequently, I got very, very good at watching poor quality video and extrapolating information about style and skill.

[sandik]

Outgoing music critic Scott Cantrell (Dallas Morning News) and ArtsJournal's Douglas McLennan weighed in about music criticism and arts criticism in general for WQXR. There are highlights in print and a 17-minute audio that can be streamed and/or downloads:

http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/newspapers-cut-critics-dark-time-dawn-new-age/?%3A+This+Week+In+WQXR&mc_cid=24b68bb1fb&mc_eid=81482feaf0

Oh thank you -- I likely wouldn't have seen this otherwise!

[dirac]

Perhaps the true situation is more like "the death of the American dance critic who gets pay and benefits for writing about dance."

“I don’t think that [The New Yorker editor] David Remnick has come to dislike dance in the last 12 years,” Acocella said when speaking to possible causes of the severe cuts to The New Yorker's dance column. There are just fewer pages available all around.

Hmmm. The New Yorker's critics do get fewer pages than previously, but I note there's still space to fit in movie reviews every week.

I liked this comment from the NPR link:

The flip side of this article's thesis is the obvious tunnel vision that publishers are showing. They are playing out the end of a media format and choosing to hasten its death by abandoning its readers. The main stream urban newspaper is now almost exclusively read by the graying population who see it as a civic duty to subscribe and read the local paper. That is the population who participate most actively in the arts scene. Publishers hasten their own demise by dropping the only relevant coverage they have left.

I have also read that some regional papers are surviving by focusing more on area happenings that other outlets don't cover. Local arts events would seem to be ideal objects for this kind of coverage.

[Helene]

When you take away the salary and benefits, you limit criticism to the very few who can live that frugally off of piecing together freelance assignments and who, until recently, most often went without health insurance, and to those wealthy enough from other means -- spouse/partner, inheritance, good investments, the buy-out packages like Cantrell got -- and who can afford to, effectively, volunteer. We're back to gentlemen's publishing with women in the same situation added in.

[dirac]

I didn't mean to suggest that the disappearance of the paying jobs was a good thing, sorry.

It has never been easy to make a living from writing, particularly writing on a niche subject. I recall that in "Play It Again, Sam," the central character has a very nice apartment even though his only apparent source of income is writing film criticism for a little magazine. I could never figure out how that worked.

[Helene]

The same way the the characters in "Friends" could afford to live in those cavernous spaces in NYC. We've come a long way from "The Honeymooners." (Although the standard answer in Allen's time was rent control, which was pretty much gone by the time of "Friends." Rent stabilization just isn't the same.)

[California]

It has never been easy to make a living from writing, particularly writing on a niche subject. I recall that in "Play It Again, Sam," the central character has a very nice apartment even though his only apparent source of income is writing film criticism for a little magazine. I could never figure out how that worked.

Not to mention Carrie Bradshaw, in her (rent-controlled) upper-east-side apartment and $500/pair shoes, supported by writing a weekly newspaper column.

But looking back over several decades, a great deal of excellent free lanced writing on dance was by people earning their living in other ways -- government jobs, teaching, etc. Their reward was token compensation (although not always), really great tickets to dance events, and a place to publish. Most of even those opportunities are gone today. When Dance Magazine and the Village Voice abandoned dance criticism, we knew we were in serious trouble.

[sandik]

There have been several responses to the Atlantic article -- I thought I'd post them here for people who might like to follow along.

This is actually an earlier column, by critic Elizabeth Zimmer, who was the dance editor at the Village Voice for a number of years. In 2009 she was discussing several of the issues that Mainwaring includes in the Atlantic.

This is from Dance Magazine, and puts the problem into context with criticism in other art forms.

And this is by Marcia Siegel

[kfw]

Thanks, sandik.

I’ve only read Kristin Schwab’s piece in Dance Magazine so far, but I find it pretty unfortunate. She notes that Dance discontinued performance reviews in 2011, but doesn’t say why. Then she clunkily refers to “a post-60s-70s dance boom era.” Then she claims that because dance programs have relatively short runs, reviews are “certainly not to help a potential ticket-buyer decide if they’ll take the plunge,” as if what’s programmed alone is of potential interest, and not the dancers, who can be seen on other programs as well. Then there is more ugliness about “how we digest art” and “consume” our “dance content” today – on Twitter, of course. Then an unattributed pronoun (it), then vaporous clichés about “humanize”-ing dance and its “cultural elitism.” Then she complains that “too much text” (not even “too many words”) ruined the Times’ piece on dance and Instagram – that’s like complaining that the dancers put photos on their Instagram sites. Articles consist of words; they’re written for people who like to read! Skipping over more bad grammar, we get to her opinion that demystifying dancers will make more dance fans. Well that’s the strategy dance companies have taking with many of their YouTube videos, so it’s worth discussing, but is it working? She doesn’t say. And what’s her point – who needs dance criticism if Instagram and artist diary pieces like Tharp’s last week sell tickets? Then more muddle about how another writer said that “dance is a barometer of the great discussions happening in our world. We need to make that connection clearer.” Never mind that a barometer is not a connection, how _is_ dance a barometer? The “connection” is not clear, but I suppose she’s referring to contemporary work with social commentary.

I guess I’m just flabbergasted that the editor of a major dance magazine would approve a piece this poorly written and poorly thought out. Good writing has spurred me to spend money on music, dance and art, and even to take an interest in a whole art form (opera). Not this stuff.

[volcanohunter]

I have to agree with kfw. Those who champion dance and wish that the art form were taken more seriously do not help their cause by engaging in fuzzy thinking and sloppy writing.

[sandik]

Read the essay by Marcia Siegel, before you write this off.

[volcanohunter]

I certainly didn't mean to suggest that I consider dance reviews unimportant. Quite the contrary. Dance Magazine ceased to be of any use to me when it stopped publishing them. But it is extremely frustrating to see poor and shallow writing in glossy dance, opera and classical music magazines, the specialized publications where you'd think good writing and criticism should be the norm.

Regarding Siegel's point on writing about "reality" dance, here's an interesting comparison: a piece by Martha Schabas, who reviews dance for The Globe and Mail, about So You Think You Can Dance, and a rambling blog post about the show that appeared on the Entertainment Weekly web site. Admittedly, I may have been too ignorant about the program to appreciate the points made in the second piece--the one time I tried watching the show I lasted about ten minutes--but I gave up on Travis Wall's post before I'd read half of it. I did read all of Schabas.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/so-you-think-you-can-dance-embodies-a-tension-between-art-and-reality-tv/article26145435/

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/09/01/so-you-think-you-can-dance-mentor-blog-travis-wall-top-6

[Helene]

The set-up for this season's So You Think You Can Dance was that the twenty dancers who appeared on the show were split into two teams: Team Stage, mentored by Travis Wall -- the tap, jazz, contemporary, ballroom dancers -- and Team Street, mentored by Twitch -- the hip hop dancers. Each week they competed against each other, and each week, one was eliminated from each group. Until August 10, the last time I watched, "America" voted after the last week's show, and the bottom three from each group were "in danger" during the current show. "America" had a few minutes to save one from each group, and then the judges decided which of the other two to save. After that they dropped to bottomtwo from each group, until this week, when one was eliminated, leaving two street and two stage dancers to duke it out in the final. I'm not sure who did the eliminating for the last three weeks.

Travis Wall's article especially criticized the elimination of former Houston Ballet dancer Jim Nowakowski, and he lambasted the judges for criticizing him for being too technical, and then when he tried to loosen up on technique in his ballroom dance, criticized him for not being technical enough. For anyone who's watched any of these shows, contradictory criticism is par for the course.

As far as criticism of the choreography, it's the same criticism I have of almost all YAGP and other competition contemporary solos: they're short and designed to be big on tricks and emotional excess and to elicit standing ovations from audiences and tears from the judges. They are meant to pack a wallop, not to show structure, development, subtlety, or maturity.

I rarely watch now, because although I understand the appeal of the backstories, and ballet would kill to get millions of people to care that a dancer eats an entire package of bacon at a time, even if the SYTYCD producers are sobbing into their beer about how years ago, it used to be 10 million, I used to watch it because I could record it and fast forward through the backstories, the judges' commentary, and the commercials. Even then most of the contemporary "It's a story about a relationship..." choreography was unwatchable, even if it elicited obligatory standing ovations from audiences and tears from the judges.

I get the appeal. I even understand it as an entry into watching dance. I just think much of the choreography is dreck, and the best parts are the hip-hop auditions -- the first few shows -- and some of the solos, because there's some extraordinary dancing in there.

If you don't like the choreography or the excesses of the dancing -- similar to those in a lot of ballet now: huge extensions and lots of tricks -- then you're an elitist and your expectations are out of line. I was simply reared on so much better: American Bandstand.

[volcanohunter]

The set-up for this season's So You Think You Can Dance was that the twenty dancers who appeared on the show were split into two teams: Team Stage, mentored by Travis Wall -- the tap, jazz, contemporary, ballroom dancers -- and Team Street, mentored by Twitch -- the hip hop dancers. Each week they competed against each other, and each week, one was eliminated from each group. Until August 10, the last time I watched, "America" voted after the last week's show, and the bottom three from each group were "in danger" during the current show. "America" had a few minutes to save one from each group, and then the judges decided which of the other two to save. After that they dropped to bottomtwo from each group, until this week, when one was eliminated, leaving two street and two stage dancers to duke it out in the final. I'm not sure who did the eliminating for the last three weeks.

Wow. And "America" requires a tutorial on the Electoral College every four years?

[Helene]

[Quiggin]

If you don't like the choreography or the excesses of the dancing -- similar to those in a lot of ballet now: huge extensions and lots of tricks -- then you're an elitist and your expectations are out of line. I was simply reared on so much better: American Bandstand.

Yes!

Siegel's and Zimmer's -though written in 2009 with lots to come - pieces were excellent brick by brick accounts of what's befallen critcism in the past twenty years. They have a sober feeling of inevitability.

But the other thing about criticism in the old days is that it was a pleasure to read - it seemed to have a better journalistic structure and words were more carefully chosen - no galloping consumption - and paragraphs played against each others and writers used journalistic caesuras and gaps to get more mileage from their words ( Anthony Lane still does). Many of the blog reviews are well written but seem to be very cautious and lack a philosophy - and an overall conception of where dance is going and how it reflects the period - just as Edwin Denby and John Martin did to helped pave the way for the acceptance of high modernist choreographers like George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham.

Zimmer talks about how in the fifties everyone was rediscovering their bodies and were curious about what they could do in movement - at Judson, at Dance Theater Workshop, etc. But now bodies have become machines of speedy moves and sleights of hand or feet or fortresses of musculature - and dance often seems less about being in the body than exorcising it of demons.

What's interesting to me and what I'd like to read more about in dance criticism is how Alexei Ratmansky and Justin Peck are using different combinations of dancers - fives, sevens etc, rather than in pas de deuxs - and developing fascinating webs of counterpoint with them. Maybe their wit can save ballet - and dance criticism.

[Jack Reed]

...

If you don't like the choreography or the excesses of the dancing -- similar to those in a lot of ballet now: huge extensions and lots of tricks -- then you're an elitist and your expectations are out of line. I was simply reared on so much better: American Bandstand.

I'll second that, or, Quiggin having already seconded it, I'll third it: Bandstand was not a circus. Dick Clark's kids knew their music, they had their stylish moves on (like their clothes), but they heard their music each time, and they danced to it. We saw the music (there's an echo of a worn phrase used to promote ballet), we saw how they heard it, and it looked like they heard it a little differently each time. They were dancing now.

They weren't showing us the extremes of what they could do, not just their tricks (though there were some), but what they heard and how they heard it; and what got me about George Balanchine's kids, when I saw them years later, was how they heard their music now.

Sure, in the back of my mind, I knew about the training and rehearsal in ballet and all that, but it didn't look like drill - cadets displaying their prepared moves - and because I had found their music, Stravinsky at play, more involving than Barry Manilow, Mr. B's show kicked the experience up a notch (and then some), but, yes, American Bandstand was much better than (what little I've seen of) these shows today. A lot more dancey.

But this is supposed to be about the decline of American dance criticism. To that, I'll just say now, especially echoing kfw's apt complaints about poor writing quality, that part of what makes Macaulay stand out is his command of writing, his ability to deploy it, his style, in contrast to Kisselgoff, his predecessor on the New York Times, whose lack of style seemed to me so telling in an arts critic: A sense of style is fundamental to the subject, and his writing exemplifies that, while hers - not that I read much of it, but for style, it was bettered by anything else in the paper I did read - did not.

[Terez]

Wow, great article, great discussion here!

[Kathleen O'Connell]

I was simply reared on so much better: American Bandstand.

And the Soul Train Line!