I never write reviews anymore, save when something affects me so strongly that I cannot help but say something about it to someone. So it was with Ballet Arizona's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," produced earlier this month here in Phoenix. I wrote about it for Dance Magazine, which published it online. Check out the review at www.dancemagazine.com/reviews.
Even as I chose to write one more dance review, our greatest living dance critic, and certainly one of the greatest critics of dance (or anything else) of the last 30 years, passed away. Clive Barnes worked almost up to the end, filing his final reviews for The New York Post in the last days of October. I never met him, but I recall his entrance to his box at the New York State Theatre in 1982 when I was there to see George Balanchine's final masterpiece, Mozartiana, danced by New York City Ballet. "Barnes is here!" was whispered among the people in the orchestra section where I sat, and we all looked back to see a majestic looking man glide into a center box, a lovely female 25 years his junior on his arm.
The regard in which Clive Barnes was held was not merely on account of his power as a critic, but because of the profound knowledge, sharp observational skills and thorough honesty he brought to his work. One Balanchine biographer relates that the great choreographer made a certain complex combination in one of his late ballets just to confound Barnes' skill at disentangling individual steps. Barnes' reviews were what reviews are supposed to be: Not "thumbs up/down" judgments, but informed reports about the works he saw and the people who made them, reports driven by a deep love of the art form and a vivid sense of prose style. If the people who run newspapers in America had any brains, they'd know the value of such work and hire scads of good critics, instead of laying them all off.
- Kenneth LaFave
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