dance criticism -

July 22, 2010September 15, 2022

NILAS MARTINS QUIETLY RETIRES FROM NYCB

According to the New York Times Arts Beat blog, Nilas Martins, longtime principal with New York City Ballet (and son of Artistic Dir. Peter Martins) has retired. Without a farewell performance, without flowers, without fanfare. The story is that he has a knee injury and suffered continuing problems with that, and ended up getting a job with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at Kennedy Center and just didn’t feel up to coming back and giving a final performance. I can’t say I blame him. He’d received so much criticism the past couple years he probably just didn’t want to see the onslaught of newspaper articles. I want to write a larger post about this, but I received a recent comment on one of my prior posts on a NYCB retirement (that I now can’t seem to find) about how the critics were too negative with the retirements, writing about the dancers’ faults toward the end instead of their entire career.

It’s a real issue.

I do believe, as Arlene Croce famously said, that a critic’s duty in a democracy is to be critical. But on the other hand, I feel like maybe different standards should apply for the retirement performances. The person is retiring, do their current weaknesses at the end of their long career and the fact that they’re not dancing as well as they did in their twenties and early thirties really need to be focused on? It’s probably easily assumed by the public that they’re not dancing as well as they once did. And poor Yvonne Borree – the critic assigned to cover her farewell was the youngest on staff; too young to have seen Borree dance in her prime, so all she could say, apart from describing the performance, was that she as a viewer couldn’t ever connect with her. And she should have said what she felt without buttering it up; she’s a journalist not a publicist. But couldn’t they have found someone who’d followed Borree’s career and saw what had been so special about her cover her final performance?

Anyway, more thoughts on this later. For now, I wish Nilas a successful arts management career in DC.

Above photo from the Daily News.

January 25, 2009

Facebook Causes Self-Reflection

By posing questions like, “how old am I?” And, “who am I?”

Regarding the first: apparently 10 years old, as I just became ridiculously giddy on Facebook’s pronouncement: “Tonya is now friends with Karina Smirnoff.” My longtime Latin ballroom IDOL 🙂

Regarding second question: one of my new FB friends asked me, “Hey, what’s up with all this Miami City Ballet stuff? Are you a dance critic?” (My status updates lately have been about going to see Miami City Ballet, where I spent the past two days).

So, hmmm. I honestly don’t know. Do bloggers = amateur (or in some cases pro) critics in this new media world? I guess it depends on the blogger and how s/he defines him/herself. I guess I want to be taken seriously as someone who gives her honest opinions and assessments of things and certainly don’t want to be seen as a lackey to any dance company, but I also try to make my connection with dance personal in a way that a newspaper critic really can’t. Ie: writing in a bit of a persona, calling dancers I really like by their first names, etc. Makes it more interesting albeit less “objective” I think.

I also want to try to avoid being too hard on an artist. I have been and it’s really upset a couple of them. As someone who’s really trying to segue from a career in law to a career as a writer — and especially a writer of fiction — I can relate to and have a deep respect for how difficult the artistic process is and how much you are really putting yourself out there when you subject yourself to public scrutiny. But then again, we all need to have thick skin if we are doing that. And writers do have to keep in mind that our readers are relying on us for our honest opinions; we’re not writing for the artists but for other dance-goers. I do make a distinction between creators who it seems are primarily interested in entertaining and maximizing profit above all else. That’s why I don’t feel badly about being harsh on the TV show producers 🙂

Oscar Wilde says a critic is a kind of artist.

So, I basically didn’t answer my the second question at all… Anyway, any other thoughts on the roles of blogger vs. critic in the age of new media, or on critic as artist?

January 10, 2009

Re-Post

I’m re-posting the post. I don’t know how to retrieve comments from Disqus so I’m re-posting the comments in the body of the post.

Parsons: An Evening of Classics, Some of Which I Love, Some of Which I Still Have Issues With

January 8, 2009

Tuesday evening I went to the opening night of Parsons Dance at the Joyce Chelsea. The season opened with Program B, all classics by founder David Parsons; later in the week the company will premiere Program A, a new rock opera.

I like this modern / contemporary company and always find them to be a lot of fun. They’re smallish but have a diverse repertoire (some dances are more lyrical and set to more classical music, others more jazzy and disco-y, set to light rock or soul music, some focused more on lighting effects), and a kind of cult following.

Actually, my favorite dance of the night was a short duet called Ebben, which is going to be part of the larger work premiering later in the week. It was just oozing with sexiness and passion, and I can’t wait to see the whole! Abby Silva, probably the most stand-out dancer in the troupe stood on high releve and kind of tip toed around Kevin Ferguson, standing with his back toward the audience, as if she was just kind of discovering him, then searching, maybe trying to understand him, to breathe in his essence.

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