Notebook: The slow erasure of a profession
By Michael Crabb
As loyal readers of Dance International know, this magazine used to be printed, quarterly. Rising costs, declining ad revenue, and stagnant sales — reflective of a broad decline in public interest in the dance arts — compelled the magazine’s publishers to make it an exclusively online publication. Thankfully, unlike earlier magazines confronting the deflation of the now legendary Ballet Boom of the 1970s and 80s, Dance International has a digital alternative to extinction.
Online publication has advantages. Potentially, it offers global reach and greater currency. Stories can be updated or corrected. It has more appeal to young readers who prefer to use hand-held devices to access information. With no time to waste, they deploy search engines to zero in on specific interests, or rely on rapacious corporations to feed them what its algorithms determine will suck them deeper into a social media vortex.
Yet, the reassuringly tactile experience of print has its enduring attractions. Whether it is a niche magazine or a general-interest newspaper, one tends to work one’s way through the printed pages. A headline that grabs or an alluring photograph may tempt one to delve deeper.
Where the digital realm can seem ephemeral, print appears more substantial and permanent. Artists still like to see their name in print, on paper. It feels more like public recognition. Those who market the arts know, however, that the place to sell is online — and nowadays it’s all about selling.
The internet and social media have, of course, so thoroughly disrupted mainstream print media’s business model that serious arts coverage, which was always carried on the back of more popular sections, has been pushed to the margins or eliminated entirely. As former Dance Magazine editor Wendy Perron told me early this century, “Dance is right out there with poetry.”
Obituaries for what was once regarded as the “profession” of dance journalism, particularly for critical writing, began to appear at least a decade ago. Nowadays they are commonplace, usually emanating from those of us who can recall a distant era when critical notices, as they were then known, were keenly followed. There was a fragile dignity and sense of responsibility in being a mainstream critic. Even if full-time positions were rare, capable and industrious freelance critics could earn a partial living from their writing.
Writing about dance, broadly speaking, has now become a hobby, largely practised in a digital realm. This does not necessarily diminish its quality or value but, because much of it is self-published and unmediated, it has encouraged anyone with an opinion to feel emboldened to express it, regardless of knowledge or understanding.
Exactly what criticism is and what gives anyone the authority to practise it remain contentious issues, perhaps more so now than ever before.
While millions of people happily subscribe to ludicrous conspiracy theories or blindly follow social media influencers, the notion of traditional authority is under siege, whether it’s that of political, judicial, and religious leaders, scientific experts, or academics. To challenge authority has always been part of the journey to adulthood but now disdain for authority, for better and for worse, is becoming socially ingrained. Dance is not immune.
Dancers are no longer willing unthinkingly to do what they’re told, or to suffer abuse from those in positions of power. The patriarchy that has ruled the ballet world for so long is beginning to crumble. As the triple goals of equality, diversity, and inclusion have moved to the forefront of public discourse, the dance world has been forced to acknowledge its own systemic deficiencies.
Those who write about dance must be well-educated about and able to negotiate issues of cultural sensitivity, including the call to decolonize the art form from those who have felt unjustly excluded by the domination of Eurocentric aesthetics. Add to this a culture in which taking personal offence has almost become a lifestyle, where anything approaching criticism makes one a “hater,” and it’s a wonder anyone is still brave enough to express a forthright opinion.
Last October, respected dance journalist Elizabeth Zimmer wrote scathingly in New York’s Village Voice about a “venerable producing organization” whose shows she’s covered for years. The organization, which with extraordinary self-restraint Zimmer declined to name, emailed her what it called its “transparent press policy.” There’s a long list of “expectations,” such as when reviewing a mixed bill, “all works should be acknowledged … not mentioning an artist and their work is erasure.” The proscriptions are so ignorant of how the media and serious criticism operate that one is tempted to imagine the whole thing was intended as a joke. Apparently not!
Where does all this leave us? Have we reached a point where it is no longer permissible to discuss the perceived merits, or shortcomings, of dances and dancers? Worse still, will a type of cautious self-censorship — avoiding anything negative in tone or even remotely contentious — creep into the practice of dance criticism as a survival tactic?
As an enthusiastic but pretty much clueless entrant to the dance world half a century ago and more, the learned critics of the day were my university. Such critics are still to be found but where once they held sway in mainstream media addressing a general readership, they are nowadays mostly preaching to the converted in niche publications. Broad public awareness of dance as an art form can only suffer as a result.
