Kiernan: did you ever know (Name omitted)
she is our age, I think. Maybe a year younger. Did the Move thing for a while
9:07 AM her first day was today.
me: oh wow
how'd it go?
Kiernan: (very well) her thesis or project or whatever is about music journalism, and her working hypothesis is that music critics shouldn't think about audience when they construct their criticism.
and I thought that was just total lunacy.
because of what we were just saying.
I don't know. How can you cut through the multitude online if you're self-interested?
9:12 AM me: WAIT
Kiernan: For me, you can still relate a subjective experience while thinking about your audience.
(waiting)
me: she's saying that music critics SHOULDN'T think about audience?
Kiernan: exactly.
me: wha
omg
this must be a trick or something!
Kiernan: or at least Chuck Klosterman says that, in the interview she did with him.
me: oh barf.
Kiernan: i know right?
9:13 AM me: that is chuck klosterman speaking now
but like that's not how you engage a community...especially with city papers
9:14 AM Kiernan: totskis.
me: i think certain writers have the credibility to turn anything into whatever they want (david foster wallace's consider the lobster, for example)
so what does she think the point of criticism is?
9:15 AM Kiernan: We didn't get that far yet.
it's a very, very interesting question, if you start with the premise that writers shouldn't think about their audience.
I mean, I think criticism has a tenuous grasp on usefulness even WHEN you're thinking about the audience.
9:16 AM me: and i'm of the belief that criticism should constantly be engaging with the art it critiques. it should be pushing the art forward, but the art should also be challenging the criticism to change
i don't know why we've been stuck in the rut for so long. it's like all criticism is modeled off of how to write a review of a year-long art exhibition.
that's a big audience who gets to see that (in terms of readership and those who also get to see the show)
guh. she can't just say that critics shouldn't think about audience. unless she wants to just turn her thesis into a big satire.
9:19 AM has she talked to anyone else?
Kiernan: I think the argument you make, with her assumptions in place, is that the subjective experience is the only honest one and you compromise your integrity by thinking of others.
(not that I agree)
9:20 AM and she has: Camile Dodero from the Village Voice, though she's a former web editor and not actually a professional music critic.
and a few more.
she's got an interview lined up with Sasha Frere-Jones.
a few more.
me: that's pretty cool
(little jealous)
9:21 AM Kiernan: what they all have in common is that their success is based mostly on genius (or whatever the fuck Chuck Klosterman is smoking) and therefore not great for modeling behavior or explaining the system.
9:22 AM Like, those dudes (and dudettes) can muscle through a thousand words of me-language and leave the reader breathing heavy.(except Klosterman. I really don't like him, in case that wasn't apparent. Though he does seem to have the above effect on plenty of people).
9:23 AM me: yeah. i do feel like she's talking to people at the best of places
9:24 AM they have these jobs because they're different. and they've been insanely, brilliantly different for forever. and like...they're of a different generation
she should really be talking to younger writers who write about music
9:25 AM Kiernan: yeah! pick me!
i keed.
Kiernan: I doubt she will.
which is fine with me.
me: SEE.THAT'S THE PROBLEM. no one wants to talk to people who are ACTUALLY doing the things. trying NEW things
9:26 AM Kiernan: yeah, but I mean.
me: and it's not a crap thesis. She's asking a really important question
but audience has everything to do with writing and why it's done.
perhaps if she went home to write on her personal blog, she wouldn't have to consider audience. but even the bands who play the gigs she sees — who once all probably said, "i do it for the art and for myself" — have to consider the audience.
Kiernan: yes
the tree in the forest
umm
9:29 AM there are multiple tree/forest metaphors
I meant the one about the sound
me: haha
falling?
or something?
whatevs
Kiernan: right yes. that one.
me: all up in arms about that
haha
9:30 AM Kiernan: so seriously: how's your project/thesis going?
since this is basically the same conversation.
me: good? i think?
i think i'm encountering a problem though
9:31 AM i dont' really have a way to justify why i've chosen the dance writers i'm reading
i read all of the dance writers for the big london papers. and i read dance writing in new york.
9:32 AM then i read an international blog about dance that rounds up dance news and reviews but also does kind of service-journalism pieces for the dance world but also attracts non-dance-worlders
i guess i picked these because they're english speaking ballet hubs
but i'm definitely leavning out a lot. i can, though, say that consistently any review you read is all text-based, with one stock image.
9:34 AM me: i can't believe how invisible dance is
most of the time
it's just completely hidden
Kiernan: I mean, I'm certainly no expert, but it seems like you could find the fair cross-section without reading a thousand writers.
me: yeah. you can.like. the village voice BARELY has a dance section.
9:36 AM
me: so if they barely have one...last article was MAY FOURTH...then what does that look like for smaller papers?
dang
Kiernan: yeah, not great.
me: i ended up writing a piece for the village voice...it was a pretend pitch
Kiernan: really?
me: yeah
Kiernan: do tell.
9:37 AM me: oh it was an exercise in linking a lot of different things that were briefly talked about in reviews or tiny news articles
i felt like in order to start the project, i needed to properly write a couple of articles about ballet and where it's situated within culture. so i ended up writing one about what's going on in london
9:38 AM with the fake pitch that it could be a reflection of what's happening in new york
york*
Kiernan: ah!
me: i even laid it out on a fake village voice website
Kiernan: that's a really smart idea.
me: thanks!
Kiernan: so many ideas seem so good until you implement them.
9:39 AM but if you start with implementation, or at least doing the thing...
man. we could have saved so much time in J school.
me: i know
i think that's why i'm feeling really squirmish about the project. i'm nervous about jumping into the 'doing' bit of some of it
it's like...come on. just try it
———————————————
So, to reflect:
There is now a masters thesis tied to the idea that audience shouldn't matter. You should write your review for...yourself? The author of the thesis says that you can compromise your integrity by thinking of others when you're writing about your experience of a review. This seems like quite an insular viewpoint. I think that asking the question of whether audience currently matters in the realm of review writing is important because it doesn't seem to matter at all.
Luke Jennings of the Observer spent most of his review of the Royal Ballet Triple Bill writing about Live Fire Exercise. Unlike other reviews, he actually makes a small transition between the Balanchine (danced first) and LFE, by saying the contrast between the two "could not have been greater." Jennings is the first person I've read who's tried to explain the disparity among the choreography, music and scenery, and he writes that the choreography "unites" the classically driven music and graphic, modern scenery by "anguished grapplings and cradlings." Is that supposed to mean the scenery is grapply? Or maybe that's the music?
Jennings was apparently so moved by LFE that the two sentences he saved to talk about DGV: Dans a Grande Vitesse were used to talk about how he wasn't in the mood to watch it:
After this I must confess that I wasn't much in the mood for Christopher Wheeldon's DGV: Danse à grande vitesse. An express train of a piece to a catchy, inconsequential score by Michael Nyman, it strains every rivet to entertain, and the dancers give it their all. But too much of me was still in that Djibouti desert, overwhelmed.
Okay, I guess it was three sentences. This strikes me as a perfect model for a review that doesn't consider audience. Just a few years ago, DGV made it's debut. Balanchine's Ballo della Regina premiered not that long ago in the historical scope of ballet. Simply as an audience member, I'm quite excited by the idea of new ballets being added to the canon of contemporary 'classics.' By performing DGV again and programming it with Ballo, is the Royal suggesting that DGV be a part of on-going performance repertoire? What does it mean to put a debut in the middle of the ballet programme? I think there were a lot of questions the critics just didn't bother to ask.
In fact, I didn't think they were posing any questions or major critique at all. Judith Mackrell says that this is "one of the most genuinely mixed bills of the season." Besides stating that there are two ballets written in the 21st century and one ballet choreographed in the 20th, she gives no clues as to how 'different' these ballets are. She actually says that McGregor's choreography in LFE is at its most classical. Wouldn't that make it a little closer in line with the Balanchine, which, as she says "looks back to the 19th Century world of its Verdi score." Additionally, in terms of a "moment" in ballet history, this programme seems to have interesting — albeit unconventional — ties that may not make it so mixed after all:
1. Although choreographed in the 1978 (though Guardian writers say it was written in the 1960s), this was the Royal's very first staging of Balanchine's Ballo della Regina. Additionally, this is the first staging of McGregor's LFE. What does that say? It obviously means that the Royal sees that Balanchine and these two young choreographers (McGregor and Wheeldon, who choreographed DGV) have something in common. Additionally, Wheeldon (DGV choreographer) choreographed the full length story ballet Alice in Wonderland, which premiered less than three months ago. What does it mean to show another Wheeldon?
2. All of the ballets are minimal with scenery, but how the stage is used is eye-catching. The blank blue screen that hangs in the back of Ballo emphasizes scale. The dancers, who turn and move so quickly you don't want to risk blinking, look as if they are tiny, wound-up toys on the stage. McGregor also does not use any props, but instead, his scenery (the digital screen) moves so slowly you forget that it's even moving. So when an explosion goes off at the sky turns dark, you barely notice. While Ballo's bare stage is there to highlight the bodies and present the dancers as truly untouchable objects (they're too fast, you can't catch them), LFE's scenery is an art in itself (It was created by digital artist John Gerrard). Because the art is moving, it takes just as much watching-energy from the audience to pay attention to the screen as it does to the dancers. Whether or not it's intentional, the scenery and the choreography are disconnected. DGV uses the most conventional staging, in that there is a prop — but it's quite futuristic, and that prop (a mesh boulder thing) becomes part of the choreography. Dancers hide behind it and walk through it — it's something to travel through. Like the digital art in LFE, which creates this new space and context to work with, DGV's mesh boulder-thing transcends 'prop' and becomes another dimension of the stage.
3. Also, the layering of time is a theme that runs through LFE and DGV.
In LFE, there is the slow passing of time within Gerrard's digital; the dancers who move the steps outside of the music's own rhythm. The music itself looks backward in time — to Bach — and reimagines baroque themes for the 21st Century. All of this on top of each other, including the context of knowing about a Live Fire Exercise, creates many tensions with time — technological, memory, sound, trauma, real-time versus slow-motion.
In DGV, time is about a tension between high-speed and slow, fragmented images (like slowly putting together bits of landscape you would see from a train). The dance is about a journey, and so you have aspects of time travel and time zones. TIME.
———————————————
So, to reflect:
There is now a masters thesis tied to the idea that audience shouldn't matter. You should write your review for...yourself? The author of the thesis says that you can compromise your integrity by thinking of others when you're writing about your experience of a review. This seems like quite an insular viewpoint. I think that asking the question of whether audience currently matters in the realm of review writing is important because it doesn't seem to matter at all.
Luke Jennings of the Observer spent most of his review of the Royal Ballet Triple Bill writing about Live Fire Exercise. Unlike other reviews, he actually makes a small transition between the Balanchine (danced first) and LFE, by saying the contrast between the two "could not have been greater." Jennings is the first person I've read who's tried to explain the disparity among the choreography, music and scenery, and he writes that the choreography "unites" the classically driven music and graphic, modern scenery by "anguished grapplings and cradlings." Is that supposed to mean the scenery is grapply? Or maybe that's the music?
Jennings was apparently so moved by LFE that the two sentences he saved to talk about DGV: Dans a Grande Vitesse were used to talk about how he wasn't in the mood to watch it:
After this I must confess that I wasn't much in the mood for Christopher Wheeldon's DGV: Danse à grande vitesse. An express train of a piece to a catchy, inconsequential score by Michael Nyman, it strains every rivet to entertain, and the dancers give it their all. But too much of me was still in that Djibouti desert, overwhelmed.
Okay, I guess it was three sentences. This strikes me as a perfect model for a review that doesn't consider audience. Just a few years ago, DGV made it's debut. Balanchine's Ballo della Regina premiered not that long ago in the historical scope of ballet. Simply as an audience member, I'm quite excited by the idea of new ballets being added to the canon of contemporary 'classics.' By performing DGV again and programming it with Ballo, is the Royal suggesting that DGV be a part of on-going performance repertoire? What does it mean to put a debut in the middle of the ballet programme? I think there were a lot of questions the critics just didn't bother to ask.
In fact, I didn't think they were posing any questions or major critique at all. Judith Mackrell says that this is "one of the most genuinely mixed bills of the season." Besides stating that there are two ballets written in the 21st century and one ballet choreographed in the 20th, she gives no clues as to how 'different' these ballets are. She actually says that McGregor's choreography in LFE is at its most classical. Wouldn't that make it a little closer in line with the Balanchine, which, as she says "looks back to the 19th Century world of its Verdi score." Additionally, in terms of a "moment" in ballet history, this programme seems to have interesting — albeit unconventional — ties that may not make it so mixed after all:
1. Although choreographed in the 1978 (though Guardian writers say it was written in the 1960s), this was the Royal's very first staging of Balanchine's Ballo della Regina. Additionally, this is the first staging of McGregor's LFE. What does that say? It obviously means that the Royal sees that Balanchine and these two young choreographers (McGregor and Wheeldon, who choreographed DGV) have something in common. Additionally, Wheeldon (DGV choreographer) choreographed the full length story ballet Alice in Wonderland, which premiered less than three months ago. What does it mean to show another Wheeldon?
2. All of the ballets are minimal with scenery, but how the stage is used is eye-catching. The blank blue screen that hangs in the back of Ballo emphasizes scale. The dancers, who turn and move so quickly you don't want to risk blinking, look as if they are tiny, wound-up toys on the stage. McGregor also does not use any props, but instead, his scenery (the digital screen) moves so slowly you forget that it's even moving. So when an explosion goes off at the sky turns dark, you barely notice. While Ballo's bare stage is there to highlight the bodies and present the dancers as truly untouchable objects (they're too fast, you can't catch them), LFE's scenery is an art in itself (It was created by digital artist John Gerrard). Because the art is moving, it takes just as much watching-energy from the audience to pay attention to the screen as it does to the dancers. Whether or not it's intentional, the scenery and the choreography are disconnected. DGV uses the most conventional staging, in that there is a prop — but it's quite futuristic, and that prop (a mesh boulder thing) becomes part of the choreography. Dancers hide behind it and walk through it — it's something to travel through. Like the digital art in LFE, which creates this new space and context to work with, DGV's mesh boulder-thing transcends 'prop' and becomes another dimension of the stage.
3. Also, the layering of time is a theme that runs through LFE and DGV.
In LFE, there is the slow passing of time within Gerrard's digital; the dancers who move the steps outside of the music's own rhythm. The music itself looks backward in time — to Bach — and reimagines baroque themes for the 21st Century. All of this on top of each other, including the context of knowing about a Live Fire Exercise, creates many tensions with time — technological, memory, sound, trauma, real-time versus slow-motion.
In DGV, time is about a tension between high-speed and slow, fragmented images (like slowly putting together bits of landscape you would see from a train). The dance is about a journey, and so you have aspects of time travel and time zones. TIME.
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