Wendy Huston, Judith Mackrell… dancers, choreographers, and critics alike are despairing over the pressures to write a performance review on the basis of a star system – being overly critical, and genuinely biased toward good/bad.
It was a point Huston addressed in the recent Juncture Festival in Leeds, and Mackrell wrote about for The Guardian, succumbing to these pressures is steering us further from the honesty of dance as an art form.
Deborah Jowitt, one of dance’s forefront dance critics and writers was fired from the Village Voice last June (after a forty-four year stint) for failing to give negative reviews. I have come across the work of Jowitt many times over the years – she has grabbed me out of some tough conundrums writing my thesis, and in trying to get my head around dance history. She writes with an uncommon ability to enable you to “see” a performance, not matter how far after the date of the work’s showing. This uncanny ability is so important in an artform so ephemeral as dance, with digital devices strongly reducing the ambience of a work once removed from the stage.
In an open letter, written shortly after the event, Jowitt expresses the necessity of needing to change herself as a person if she were to change her style of writing. For me, the strength in Jowitt’s writing has been in creating a space for you to experience the piece, then decide for yourself whether you want to see it or not – not a pre-judgement over the work’s validity. I especially appreciated her views because in most cases, dance work didn’t tour to Australia – but I still wanted to know what was going on, and Jowitt allowed me this space to experience that.
Brian Parks (editor of the Village Voice), responded to Jowitt’s open letter, stating “I want to express both my great respect and affection for Deborah, but the dance coverage simply needs to be more vigorously balanced—an obvious journalistic goal.” I can see his point of view, and certainly this is the path that dance criticism seems to be taking, but I have to question the direction of this. I don’t think dance can be viewed in the same way as a movie… pros and cons about the choreographers and dancers are often very personal ones, and the ultimate drive behind developing a work is often to bring the audience member into the created space. In a world where we begin to judge this experience as black and white, I believe we’re stripping the dance work of a depth present in live performance.