6 posts tagged “dance critics”

I don't really have time for this right now, but I thought I'd just dash off this post while it was fresh in my mind.

While running a few errands at lunch, I picked up my copy of the latest New Yorker.  I was thumbing through it on the subway platform on my way back and saw that the issue included Joan Acocella's review of the recent Morphoses engagement at City Center, which I began reading.  I had made it through a couple of paragraphs in disbelief when I picked my head up long enough to see which train was pulling in on the express track.  Wrong one.  I turned back to the magazine and noticed that there now was a wet spot on the page that had not been there before.  It probably was just a drop of gooey muck from the steam pipe overhead, but maybe it was the ghost of some departed New York dance critic--tears or ectoplasm?

I guess we can take Acocella's presence (ostensibly as a dance critic) in the New Yorker as the naturally corollary to the New York City Ballet's supposedly being in an endless trajectory of decline since its glory days under Balanchine.  What else can explain this dumb and fatuous shit in the still prestigious publication?  I thought that James Wolcott's blog post regarding Acocella's gushy summer promotional piece on Mark Morris, Joanie Loves Chunky, was a bit over the top, but many of the same elements he eviscerates in that earlier writing are also present in what is allegedly a critical review of Wheeldon's new company. 

For example, Acocella's utter abandonment of the responsibilities of being a dance critic. Of Wheeldon's Fools' Paradise, she remarks, "I would like to have been able to figure out what it was other than a gorgeous configuration of well-toned bodies."  Um, isn't that like why you were paid for the article and got free tickets--to figure it out?

There are other gems to be gleaned from just about every paragraph, but Acocella's bizarre acknowledgment of Maria Kowroski's maturation as a performer (which she credits solely to Wheeldon's inspiration) is particularly gross:  "But as one followed her from season to season there seemed to be a blank that she couldn’t fill in. She was the platonic form, all right, but not the earthly enactment. I thought maybe she wasn’t too bright." 

Stop talking about yourself, sweetheart.

I ran out of steam on my (overlong) previous post.  But I thought that some good (bad) criticism would make a nice change.

The retirement of Kyra Nichols and several other prominent ballerinas after relatively long careers this past spring certainly forced many critics into an unusually introspective mode.  But the yoking together of these disparate dancers often seemed forced and irrelevant as in Alastair Macaulay's June 10th piece.  Were those four ballerinas (especially in the eyes of New York audiences) really all equals?

As usual, a 1996 article by Arlene Croce, Our Dancers in the Nineties (one of her final pieces to appear in The New Yorker), still resonates, and, in touching on a related theme, doesn't leave much that is fresh to be added.

The tribute it contains to Nichols is at once stirring and sad.

To the emergence of the business company we owe the phenomenon of the disaffiliated ballerina – the dancer who seeks artistic completion by freelancing or guest-starring all over the world.  Nichols is a disaffiliated star who never left her home company.  One could say that it never left her, but there has been no actual rupture between her and Peter Martins.  Since they’ve stopped working together, she has if anything found more freedom to maneuver and more challenge and inspiration in her roles.  The splendid isolation of Kyra Nichols can even be a dramatic statement.  When she enters in Vienna Waltzes, it’s on a high note of resolve: “Alone then!”  Head up, erect as only Kyra Nichols can be, she walks into the darkened ballroom.

Croce's writing is so powerful; it either wins you over to her argument or it doesn't.  There's no real middle ground.  She easily manages to convince the reader that her own viewpoint is reflective of a "Kyra Nichols" true state of mind or attitude. 

What comes after the "disaffiliated ballerina" then?  It surprised me in the various ruminations on retiring ballerinas I read, that neither Macaulay nor any other critics commented on whether or not they believed that there still would be ballerinas in the future (or ones with careers that lasted over twenty-five years).

At the request of someone, a couple of days ago I had started working on a response to Alastair Macaulay's round-up of the NYCB spring season in last Sunday's Arts and Leisure section, but I was finding it tough going.  Primarily, I believe, because I didn't think I found anything that Macaulay had to say to be all that interesting or memorable.

I referred that friend, who was troubled by the puzzling tone of the second half of the Macaulay piece, to a similar article by Robert Gottlieb in the New York Observer, in which he expresses many of the same observations (even to the point of praising and castigating many of the very same dancers).  Although Macaulay is perhaps a slightly better writer, the Gottlieb essay makes a better read, drawing as it does from a deeper experience with NYCB, than Macaulay, at this stage as a New York critic, is able to muster.

Some of Macaulay's rhetorical strategies are downright laughable.  The opening paragraph, in its combination of gushy name-dropping and what one can only hope is faux naivete is disingenuous and representative at the same time:

IN moving to New York this year, I had expected to see much of the world’s best choreography and many of the world’s finest dancers. I hadn’t quite expected a single week like June 18 to 24, when I saw not only the farewell performances of Kyra Nichols and Alessandra Ferri but also dancing by, among many others, Nina Ananiashvili, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Roberto Bolle, Angel Corella, Herman Cornejo, Maria Kowroski, Diana Vishneva and Damien Woetzel (as well as Victor Barbee, Georgina Parkinson and Frederic Franklin in character roles). And I had no notion that New York City Ballet would include a young dancer like Ashley Bouder.

Didn't he take the time read his press kits or his schedules while he was unpacking?  Also, Ashley Bouder, even for NY Times readers, is hardly an undiscovered country.  Her rapid progress having only been slowed down here and there by injuries.

Perhaps the most irksome passage, however, was Macaulay's paean to the Balanchine repertory, in which, comparing it to a dismayingly trivial set of touchstones of "great" Western art available in New York City, he concludes, "[they are] works that make the New York State Theater seem the same kind of sublime haven the Frick Collection is."

Now that is troubling.  Misguided (and possibly insincere) as some of Martins' attempts have been, the stated goal of his regime always has been to try to balance a commitment to honoring the legacy of NYCB's founders with the development of new works in that tradition.  While it can be argued that he has been a miserable failure in both regards, it is only fair to point out that Martins has repeatedly said that he never wanted to see NYCB become a "Balanchine Museum." 

I certainly don't begrudge Macaulay his opportunity to lounge Jellaby Postlethwaite-like in the Frick's Garden Court, but it was very telling that the task of reviewing the sole new work of the season, Christopher Wheeldon's The Nightingale and the Rose was assigned to Jennifer Dunning.  Nor did Macaulay appear to engage very much with the other recent work, new to the repertory, Alexei Ratmansky's Middle Duet, tossing off a couple of brief paragraphs in his May 17th review.  Other than the individual performances of many of the dancers, I would consider Ratmansky's bold revisions to what, in its performance at the Fall gala, seemed an intriguing, but unfinished work, the single most encouraging development of the season.  Full points to Ratmansky for having the integrity to make any kind of alteration to a work that was already widely-praised. I haven't experienced enough of his choreography to know whether or not I really like it, but it is refreshing to see the work of someone who appears to have an authentic "voice" and soul.  Shouldn't NYCB be more seriously trying to cultivate a continuing relationship with him, now that Wheeldon is gone?

I also found Macaulay's singling out of the declining (or non-existent in the first place?) abilities of Darci Kistler, Nilas Martins, and Yvonne Boree to be so much flogging of an already-dead horse.  Do these dancers cast themselves (do they?).  Kistler, who, after a busy May (appearing in every performance of Romeo + Juliet) I believe danced rarely, if at all, in June, certainly does not maintain a lock on any roles the way Heather Watts did in the early 1990s.  The only part she danced exclusively this spring was in Liebeslieder Walzer, but that ballet, which demands a full complement of mature dancers or ones with a mature sensibility (increasingly rare in any company) is notoriously difficult to cast.  Taken along with his earlier commentary on the violence in Martins' R+J, it amounted to little more than a personal attack, as does his criticism of Nilas Martins.  Neither Martins nor Boree have fared well in many of the opportunities handed to them over the years, but they have been dancing far less and somewhat better (for them) in the past year. 

What is the point of this kind of criticism, anyway?  Does Macaulay seriously think he has the power to effect casting?  While I'm sure the announcement of Nilas Martins' arrest on cocaine possession earlier this morning is in no way connected with the adverse criticism of Macaulay or others, perhaps it is as well to keep in mind that these are real people after all.  Criticism can be pointed, but it should have a point as well.

Or did it? 

Amusing blast at NY Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay on James Wolcott's blog today.  Macaulay has had it coming.  His latest piece on the Kyra Nichols farewell certainly was ludicrously overripe.  Especially since I was not able to attend, I had hoped for a more objective blow-by-blow account of the evening than he offered.

Still, I don't totally agree with Wolcott's critique.  The most annoying thing about Macaulay has not necessarily been his display of ego or over insertion of himself into his reviews.  It's that his frame of reference in the context of New York culture (and in regard to New York City Ballet in particular) has been so limited and tedious.  Enough with the nostalgia already.  You're being paid to be reviewed what's in front of you.  Even sometime Anglophiles are bored. 

That said, I've also found Wolcott's own cultural criticism to be a tad myopic lately.  Or his taste questionable at the very least: relentless partisanship of a certain Soviet ballerina who shall go nameless and equally endless hyping of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, which went downhill a long time ago.  Anyway, it was never the overrated Vincent D'Onofrio's Goren who made the show rock back when it still did, it was always Kathryn Erbe's Eames who made it a must-see and hear.

Thank heavens this week marks a return to the repertory (more or less as usual) at the New York City Ballet.  I really had no interest in ever mentioning the recent production of Romeo + Juliet in this space again, but I just couldn't refrain from commenting on the recent series of articles in The New York Times by Alastair Macaulay on the production.

The NYCB spring season has provided the new Chief Dance Critic with his first real opportunity to make his presence known with New York observers.  Macaulay, a long time critic for the Financial Times, was appointed to the position earlier this year after the unlamented John Rockwell stepped down.  His selection generated a small buzz of controversy in the dance blogosphere (such as it is) after a protest voiced by Apollinaire Scherr (a former stringer for the Times and current critic for Newsday), whose ill-reasoned expressions of outrage on her blog that a woman wasn't chosen for this plum job (and even more bizarre dismay that some old fuddy-duddy "furriner" was being asked to cover the New York scene), opened her up (justifiably, I would say) to accusations of sour grapes.

I thought Macaulay was a good choice, especially given the dearth of decent critics out there.  I haven't read much of his writing, but had been impressed when he subbed for Arlene Croce at The New Yorker way back in the late 1980s, and I have seen a few of his reviews and more scholarly pieces over the years that were uniformly compelling.  So it has been interesting to observe him getting his feet wet at the Times.

Moving on to R + J, Macaulay wrote a ho hum preview piece giving an overview of past productions and his personal relationship to the work.  His review of the premiere was fairly restrained; trenchant regarding the costumes, but cautiously optimistic that a few tweaks by Martins might improve the choreography.  In his second review, which analyzed the qualities of the various casts, Macaulay seemed to have drunk of the Kool-Aid (left in a safe by Anna Kisselgoff?), in which seldom can a discouraging word about the Company or Martins be allowed to be heard on the pages of the Newspaper of Record.  I'm sure that the dancers deserved the fulsome praise, but the lingering aftertaste of the piece (which, seemed to imply that, since we have to live with it, we might as well make the best of what this production has to offer), left me feeling a little uneasy (or was that queasy?).  His third review, which I only got around to this morning (I was avoiding reading any reviews anywhere in advance of seeing Encores!), however, just plain made me mad.

In his previous review, Macaulay had made some brief commentary about the production registering a possible critique of patriarchal society that, at the time, I felt was being overly generous to Martins' intent.  Thought-provoking perhaps, but I really didn't see it.  In his latest article, apparently building upon that argument, Macaulay focuses on a jarring moment in the production that regularly appears to elicit gasps from the audience: when Jock Soto as Lord Capulet slaps the disobedient Juliet across the face.  After a rather arbitrary and slapdash round-up of works for the stage he cites, in which physical abuse is heaped upon women, Macaulay, fighting off his delicate "hesitation," quite shockingly and gratuitously dredges up Martins' own well-documented incident of physical abuse in a manner which is highly disrespectful to the victim of that violence, Martin's wife, Darci Kistler.  I think it is really reaching to see that stage moment (or anything else in the production) as being a public apology to Kistler and atonement to the spirit of Lincoln Kirstein in his centennial year.  As justification for his theory, Macaulay cites a passage in Duberman's new biography of Kirstein.  Macaulay's account makes it seem as if the notorious domestic abuse episode "nearly lost" Martins his job and that Kirstein would "never speak" to Martins again if he heard of another such incident taking place.  Now, I haven't read the book, but it seems to me that Macaulay may be conflating things here somewhat.  In the first place, Kirstein alone probably did not have enough influence by 1992 to get Martins dismissed from his job, and, moreover, that stern warning, in this context, sounds like very weak tea indeed.  A more interesting question to consider, I think, is what sort of pressure might Kirstein or the NYCB Board have brought to bear on Kistler to remain silent?

At any rate, I think the article was a very distressing and cheap way for Macaulay to try to generate buzz about his column, and, in essence, another form of violence perpetrated upon Kistler.  Surely it is her story to tell (or not to tell) as she freely chooses.

Judging from today's New York Times, New York City Ballet finally got around to belatedly paying tribute more formally to Melissa Hayden this past Tuesday evening.  Jacques d'Amboise was on hand to repeat some of the remarks he had made at an earlier NYCB Guild seminar and the program offered two pieces in which Hayden originated roles.

On another note, it looks as if the paper may be auditioning Gia Kourlas and Claudia La Rocco to replace the unlamented John Rockwell (you can enjoy some of James Wolcott's admirably snarky comments re: Rockwell) as "regular" dance critic (from a crowded field, no doubt).  Kourlas is probably the better writer, but there's not much pleasant to add to that particular comment and I'm trying to keep this G-rated for now.

I am going to the performance tonight and looking forward to it.  But it's frigging cold, a frigging long program, and I'm really frigging tired.  Will coffee help?