Reviewing Clement Crisp: Six decades of dance
By Michael Crabb
Clement Crisp, the eminent, irreverent, and some might argue outrageous late dean of British dance critics, did not believe in half measures. His freely admitted but always well-argued prejudices oscillated from one extreme to the other, even within the frame of a single review. For example, in the matter of a Tanztheater Wuppertal double bill in 2008, Crisp took stern issue with what he described as the self-regarding pretensions of Pina Bausch’s Café Müller, then proceeded to rhapsodize about her Rite of Spring. “Dance rooted in the score,” he wrote, “excavating terrified gestures from its energies, dancers with every anguished bone in their faces marked with sweat and earth, gasping bodies drawn ever onward.” Any writer who has tried to capture in words some sense of the power of that work can only stand in awe of Crisp’s concise and poetic descriptive mastery.
They might also envy Crisp’s barbed wit, a gift that made his reviews a delight to read, even for those with no great regard for dance. How can one resist this from 2001, with tanztheater on the chopping block again: “I suppose we must be at war with Belgium. How else to explain the vicious attack on the Barbican’s public by the Brussels-based troupe Rosas under the command of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker on Thursday night?”
Assessing a Maurice Béjart all-Stravinsky triple bill in London in 1980, Crisp begins: “Béjart and Stravinsky is one of those fabled partnerships, like Romeo and Goneril or bacon and strawberries.”
He was not afraid to voice his fatigue with over-worked classics: “another Swan Lake nearer the Crematorium.” And he had an unanswerable excuse for declining an unwelcome invitation: “Sadly, I find I am engaged that evening for self-administered root canal surgery — without benefit of anesthetic.”
Crisp once advised me: “If you’re going in for the kill, head straight for the jugular.” He practised what he preached. Pussyfooting and fence-sitting were in his view cowardly and dishonest. Yet, while he bemoaned what he saw as the herd-like instincts of bamboozled audiences, he was always courteous to the public. If an audience member — usually a total stranger — approached the tall, elegantly dressed Crisp to exclaim over how marvellous they found the evening, his standard response was, “I’m so glad you’re enjoying yourself.”
In March 2009, Crisp visited Toronto — he loved his overseas junkets — to see an ambitious National Ballet of Canada mixed program of new works by Canadian choreographers. Crisp was the star attraction of the pre-performance talks. I was there to get him going. It took little effort. He was a captivating speaker. He made a point of reassuring his audience that each of them should feel confident in the legitimacy of their personal response to a work of art. What he left unsaid was that the broader value of such responses increases with the level of knowledge, experience, and intelligence informing them, all of which Crisp possessed in great quantity. The books he wrote, many of them in collaboration with fellow critic and former Dancing Times editor Mary Clarke, remain essential to any serious dance library.
Crisp died March 1, 2022, at 95, a considerably older age than he’d previously led people to believe he had reached. For six decades the Financial Times had published his always enlivening, erudite, and witty observations about ballet and a dazzlingly diverse range of other dance styles, from Indian classical dance to hip-hop.
Published collections of dance writing are less common in Britain (and Canada) than in the United States, where the wisdom of such critics as Marcia Siegel, Arlene Croce, and Deborah Jowitt — all younger than Crisp and still with us — is preserved in multiple volumes. Had it not been for the initiative of a group of Crisp’s admirers, who published the book through the International Dance Writing Foundation, we would not have the relatively compact (319 pages) but valuable collection of his writings which appeared last year under the functional title Clement Crisp Reviews: Six decades of dance (distributed by Troubador Publishing). Judiciously edited by British dance critic Gerald Dowler, the collection provides a rich tapestry of the changing British and international dance scene over an extended period of time. The style of writing, from more formal and reserved in earlier days to the less inhibited and glittering prose of recent decades, reflects the social changes of which Crisp was a part.
Although he could be stubborn in his opinions, Crisp was no stick-in-the-mud. He loved being agreeably surprised by something unfamiliar, and was a great champion of British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan at a time when others had yet to acknowledge his genius.
Crisp believed in the value of tradition and admired companies that were somehow still connected to their historic roots. Thus, he admired the Bolshoi and Maryinsky, the Royal Danish Ballet, and Britain’s Royal Ballet, except in the latter instance he worried that it was abandoning its heritage.
Doubtless, Crisp hurt a lot of feelings as he meted out unforgiving judgment on anything he considered mediocre, pretentious, or tedious. Yet he also won many friends among dancers and choreographers — Alicia Markova, Natalia Makarova, Paul Taylor, Yuri Grigorovich — who respected his depth of knowledge and abiding passion for dance. How often does a major ballet company dedicate a performance to a critic? That’s what the Royal Ballet did in May 2019. It was, appropriately, a performance of MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. As Royal Ballet director Kevin O’Hare remarked in a curtain speech, without Crisp’s continuing encouragement, “I do believe we would not have had some of the masterpieces that Kenneth created for the company.”