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The Buzz, 9-30: Tere
on a Tear
Dear Mr. O'Connor: Put up or Shut up
By Paul
Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2005 The Dance Insider
Poor Tere O'Connor.
He doesn't want to be liked; he wants to be understood. Not enough
for this choreographer-verbeographer that, with the best equipment
available to her -- all any of us in the critical field can offer
-- Joan Acocella attempted, in an August New Yorker column, to do justice to the work
of O'Connor and three other artists, as seen in recent concerts,
using her considerable descriptive powers to colorfully cram into
the limited space her editors gave her as many vivid details from
the choreographers' creations as she could, framing each work and
the ensemble in a larger theme so that she could give her (general)
readers a story with an arc and not just a regurgitation of four
evenings of dance with accompanying thumbs up and thumbs down that
only dance insiders would care to read. Tere has to throw a public
tantrum because he didn't get his own review but had to share Joan's
column with three other artists, and because for Tere, it's not
enough that a reviewer come to his concert and then sit down afterwards
to try to translate it to a larger audience; she has to reach out
to him for supplementary information on his concept if he failed
to make it clear in the work at hand.
Here's some of what
Joan had to say about O'Connor's "Frozen Mommy," after sharing some
of the juicy details of the work: "Emotion is thus taken seriously,
and also undercut, with great psychological accuracy. At the end,
the dancers stand stock still, with their hands on their hips, for
about three unbearable minutes. 'Enough of these histrionics!' they
seem to say. Then one of them falls to the floor, sobbing, and the
lights go out. Is your heart broken? No, but it is shaken. You saw
Mommy, and she was frozen."
Efficiency in selection
of details, followed by pure poetry in summing up how the work hit
her. Sounds like a rave to me -- but not to Tere, who whines, in
a letter to the New Yorker which he's been circulating to the dance
community, "Through her lack of understanding and her inability
to reach out and get information from artists, (Acocella) joins
a group of critics whom I will call 'the literalists.' These critics
do not know how to read dances created outside the restricted confines
of the narrative or musical frameworks from past centuries. What's
more, they don't do the work of finding out what is actually
going on in the minds of artists or what are the contexts in which
these works are created." (Emphasis added.) (O'Connor's uber-complaint
is that Acocella groups him and the three other artists she reviews
into a modern dance trend she thumbnails as 'Downtown surrealism.')
I see. So Tere, it's
not enough that a critic know how to sell an article on your perhaps
obtuse-seeming (to the general public) dance to an editor who likely
doesn't care about dance, doesn't know dance or, just as likely,
doesn't like it; that she do the Herculean work of fitting as many
concerts as possible into very compressed space not because she
wants to reduce you all to one common mien, but because she wants
to SPREAD THE WORD about your movement; and that she is likely doing
so for very little remuneration, no matter how talented she is and
for how long she's been at her craft. No, she also has to seek you
out and have you tell her your preferred context, the one you seem
to have failed to get across on stage to a seasoned dance critic
who, if you read her with any regularity, you would know is not
stuck in the Romantic and Classical ballet eras, as your letter
contends, but devoted to doing her best as one reporter on the biggest
dance beat in the world. No Tere, you are pissed and pissy and pissing
on the critic, and all her supposed ilk, because she doesn't describe
you and appreciate you as you would describe and as you appreciate
yourself.
But Mr. O'Connor does
not stop at his catty and unfounded reductions of my respected colleague.
(Okay for him to reduce her to cliches of the corseted balletomane;
not okay for her to reduce him into being a surrealist.) No, in
a snippy forward to his letter to the New Yorker which accompanies
the copy he's circulating to the community, he states (who's being
pompous now?), "I hope it will spark some discussion about the unfortunate
state of dance writing."
MR. O'CONNOR. I've had
it with people like you taking out your frustrations by pissing
on MY community, without which there would be no record in the public
ledger of YOUR community. We are not the enemy! I've tried in the
past to avoid adducing the writers of this publication when this
criticism of criticism has come up, because it might seem self-serving,
but simple pride and outrage prevent me from doing so any longer.
(My fingers are even shaking on the keyboard.) For more than seven
years now, the Dance Insider has been introducing a new generation
of dancer-critics to the field of dance writing, as well as showcasing
some of the brightest veteran critics -- most of them dance artists
themselves. Until this month, except for an occasional stipend these
dancer-critics have worked FOR FREE, providing expert, authoritative
reviews (including of your company), all of which YOU and anyone
else have been able to read FOR FREE. (If not the only, we are the
largest dance-only publication to offer this.) Not because they
don't value their work but because rather than just bemoan the sorry
state of the field, they decided to do something about it. Instead
of just griping about dance criticism and journalism, they, along
with the dancer webmistress of this publication, decided to grow
it.
Tere, as self-satisfying
as it may feel to apply your considerable wit to dissing a critic
who doesn't understand you as you'd like to be understood, wouldn't
it be more productive to apply your literary talent -- and authority
-- to making your own dance criticism? To paraphrase Scoop Nisker:
If you don't like the reviews, go out and make some of your own.
We'll publish 'em.
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