Breaking cover

Series: Critical distances

The first time I wrote about dance was a cold February night almost ten years ago. Beer in hand, I followed my mentor, dance writer Sanjoy Roy, into the darkened auditorium for a scratch night festival I’d be covering. I was still a jobbing performer, or in-between jobs, as they say, wheeling the drip-bag of freelance dread behind me: imposter syndrome, failed auditions, a lingering anxiety about paying the bills. To spare future friendships I’d borrowed a pen-name – Mary Clipperton – and now Mary was meant to judge people I might share a studio or drink with next week.

In the blackout I felt the two selves colliding: dancer, good little soldier on the one hand; critic, prone to grumbling on the other. Meanwhile, onstage: earnest thrashing, inexplicable prop choices, a soundtrack that coughed and died mid-cue. I filled my notebook with irritation and then a degree of guilt, wondering whether I was serving anyone here or just being a dick.

Peter Brook once warned that when a critic spends most of her time grumbling, she is almost always right; she issues ‘a call for competence’. The border between that call and plain dickishness is hair-thin.

Some dance critics used to be dancers, but they normally have the decency to retire before they start writing; I hadn’t. Auditions loomed – possibly with the very dancers who’d read my piece at breakfast. I’ve always wondered, since writers review each other’s novels all the time, why not dancers? Times and technologies have turned us all into hustlers – performers-slash-producers-slash-publicists – what’s one more slash?

After the show I slipped home and wrote the negative review. It felt like a transgression: friendly fire on fellow dancers. You’re not really supposed to do that, as an artist, because we all know how hard it is to make any kind of work. Solidarity above all.

Still, I clicked Send and went to bed.

Predictably, nothing happened. No irate WhatsApps. No social media uproar. The internet shrugged. The dancers surely read it… maybe they didn’t care, maybe my cover held. I kept asking myself: was the agonising worth it? Reviews are supposed to guide audiences, but the audience stays silent – where is the exchange in that?

Since then, I’ve reviewed under my real name. The guilt never disappeared. Which is good, really, as it keeps an honest sense of generosity in the task at hand while people are getting out there on stage, so very vulnerable. The cliché says that critics snarl because they’re failed artists, but I’m euphoric when a show soars. Bad work deadens a room. Readers love a scathing review because it puts that feeling into words. Great work, though, lifts everyone and makes excellence feel within reach.

With so little cash floating around dance journalism, torching one’s own social capital over a bad review looks irrational, but maybe the money vacuum is the whole point: no one’s paying us to lie, and someone should call out mediocrity… Because if they don’t, then we all agree to live in a perpetual purgatory of middlebrow musical revivals and navel-gazing experiential dance.

Perhaps what the dance world needs, then, within its incestuously closed ranks, is more outward-facing public engagement – more dancers with notebooks, in short, who are prepared to break cover. ●