Archives for posts with tag: criticism

Farewell to Theatre Notes

December 11, 12 //  
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So while I’ve been on blog hiatus (health reasons, I’m afraid), Alison Croggon has finally decided to close Theatre Notes to concentrate on her other writing. I’m heartbroken by it. Here’s my eulogy for the best theatre blog in Australia, a look at how it has helped change criticism, and a challenge to the almost complete policy vacuum regarding arts criticism in this country.

Alison Croggon

Melbourne’s theatre scene lost a passionate and erudite voice last week with the closure of Australia’s most popular theatre blog, Alison Croggon’s Theatre Notes. The blog was founded in 2004 – around the time I started writing about theatre for this paper – and over eight years became a seemingly endless fount of reviews, news and theatre commentary, spiced up by a twee persona and, as time went on, repetitive whinges about the author’s own fatigue.

Now, navel-gazing digression, flaunting your idiosyncrasies – these are perils of the online diary format. And it’s true the blog could amplify Alison’s flaws as a critic: her intellectual vanity; her capacity, especially early on, to attack recklessly and without restraint; and various unconscious biases (the most serious, arguably influenced by a consulting relationship between Alison and the Malthouse management, was her tolerance for the frequent and inane whimsy in Michael Kantor’s Malthouse productions – a tolerance she lacked elsewhere).

Yet Alison always wrote about the theatre with energy and passion, restless intellect and original insight. She could argue with stentorian vehemence for the rights of the critic and always insisted on the importance of criticism to the evolution of art, particularly in a form as evanescent as theatre.

Alison also took full advantage of the unlimited space blogs offer – a huge opportunity for arts criticism. She was the rarest kind of theatre blogger – a professionally trained print critic with the time and money to write long form reviews and commentary, over an extended period, free of charge – and our theatre scene is immeasurably richer for her contribution.

Theatre Notes’ influence is hard to overstate. When I began reviewing theatre in 2004, print still dominated theatre coverage, with the main reviews limited to newspapers and magazines. Artists made art, a handful of critics responded in the press, and that was that.

The blogosphere offered a different, more discursive model for arts critique, and helped redefine the possibilities for criticism as we swam inexorably from print to online and digital media. Now, almost every arts critic worthy of the name has a blog, and due to the main novelty of blogging – the ability for all and sundry to comment – reviews can be discussed, scrutinised and argued over in public.

It is this aspect of Theatre Notes I’ll miss most. The critical topsoil has always been thin in this country, and the opportunity for serious and sophisticated public dialogue about art is rare.

Through her blog, Alison has interacted with other critics, artists, random audience members, overseas colleagues, fawning admirers, trenchant detractors (and even on a few memorable occasions Nigerian spam), and sure, there were flame wars, ignorant trolls, red herrings and all the rest of it, but at its best the discussion was salon-like, intense and informed, and people came to rely on it to develop their own appreciation of the art.

I myself have had more than a few entertaining stoushes with Alison online, and I’ve lost count of the number of people who have approached me to say they’d like to see a David and Margaret-style show about theatre. The appetite for critics treating their art as a blood sport – as if art really, really matters – is huge.

Although Theatre Notes is an impressive achievement, its demise raises serious questions about the future of arts criticism in Australia. As Alison and I noted at the Australian Theatre Forum last year, our critics – online and otherwise – face an almost total lack of institutional support.

The situation is dire. Arts coverage in print media has dwindled as newspapers struggle to survive, and over the last 18 months, the ABC has eviscerated its arts journalism on TV and radio, virtually ripping up its charter commitment to the performing arts. Online criticism has manifest advantages in this environment, but without some policy intervention, they’re likely to be squandered.

Running a blog takes time and energy, and arts criticism is too important to rely on dilettantes like Alison doing it for free. The Literature and Theatre Boards of the Australia Council have had eight years – eight years – to monitor the development of blog-based criticism and find ways to reward and sustain the best of it. They’ve done nothing.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but there’s a reason all of our most famous arts critics are expatriates. Australia just doesn’t give a shit.

It’s completely dunderheaded, because art and criticism have a symbiotic relationship. Creative culture thrives in the presence of a vigorous critical culture – artists tend to excel when they know their work is being taken seriously.

Theatre Notes did more than its fair share to help create the illusion of a strong critical culture here. Now it’s gone, hard questions have to be asked about how we can support our critics to turn that illusion into a more lasting reality.

(Published in The Age, 10/12/2012.)

The Green Rooms Are Letting Us Down: Should Melbourne have a Critics Award for Theatre?

March 26, 12 //  
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All kinds of objections can be raised against arts awards. Ray Lawler gave the most common when he declined to be involved in the founding of the Green Room Awards in 1982. The playwright wished the awards well, but believed that competition was inimical to what the arts – and especially a form as collaborative as theatre – should stand for.  

The obvious riposte is that the strife of creative competition has ushered in some of the greatest periods in theatrical history. Would ancient Greek drama have flourished and been remembered without annual play contests? Would English Renaissance theatre – the decades that gave us Shakespeare and Jonson and Marlowe and Webster – have happened without London’s many playhouses and the intense rivalry between them?

Celebrating artistic achievement through awards has benefits, but only if the awards themselves have lustre and credibility. Unfortunately, most of the cachet the Green Room Awards now possess derives from the opposite of competition. As Melbourne’s only performing arts awards, they hold a monopoly. It really doesn’t matter how shoddy and compromised the judging processes become. If the alternative is no awards at all, the Green Rooms look good in comparison.

Unlike Sydney or Adelaide, where theatre awards are decided by critics, the Green Rooms are peer-based – judged by panels of artists, academics and commentators, with artists predominating. Artists rewarding artists immediately raises questions of conflict of interest, of transparency and accountability, and competence to judge purely on merit. The collaborative nature of most performing arts makes warm fuzziness and mutual backslapping particularly likely.

The fact that our 21st century theatre scene is so diverse and robust also means that, to adequately discharge their role, some judges (notably the independent theatre panel) must see more than a hundred productions a year. The risk is that the best and brightest artists won’t have the time – something a quick look at the panellists tends to confirm. Given that judges appoint new judges, it’s a slippery slope.

Seeing so much performance is an onerous responsibility – one that sources within the Green Room Association itself say judges often don’t meet. Of equal concern are claims that procedures designed to ensure the integrity of the awards – including panels meeting once every three months to discuss work, and limiting panellists to a maximum of three years to make the judging pool more broadly representative – have fallen by the wayside.

In spite of this, every year the Green Room Awards has its share of worthy winners. No fair-minded observer could begrudge Angus Cerini’s Save For Crying its slew of awards, nor Zahra Newman her Best Female Performer gong for the tour de force in Debbie Tucker Green’s Random. Yet, while there’s room for wide brown plains of disagreement about theatre in Victoria, every year there are indefensible decisions that insult the skill and vitality of our theatre scene and tarnish the credibility of the awards.

In 2012, two stand out. The first is the failure to nominate Red Stitch Actors Theatre for a single award. To anyone who saw the bulk of their 10th anniversary season, the strongest in years, that’s dingbats: Nadia Tass’s production of The Aliens, in particular, was one of the highlights of 2011. The other bizarre decision was the Music Theatre panel refusing to give an award for Best Musical, without giving any public reason. Why would they? It’s the Green Rooms or nothing, right?

I wonder whether we should we follow the example of Sydney and Adelaide and have theatre awards decided by critics.  Of course, I’m a critic, so I would say that.

Apart from my (admittedly burning) desire to sit on yet another judging panel for no money, my concern is altruistic – to ensure that our theatre artists are awarded solely on merit, something small, peer-review panels seem incapable of doing with any consistency. (And it’s as much a problem at the Australia Council, which decides arts grants this way, as it is at the Green Rooms. Unlike the Green Rooms though, the Australia Council is in the middle of a public consultation about its process.)

The case for a Critics Award is overwhelming. Aesthetic evaluation lies at the heart of a critic’s craft, and transparency and accountability are built directly into our work. Critics must compose a written response and deliver it into the public domain, where it can be scrutinised and, in the internet age, often subjected to public correspondence and discussion.

Critics are well placed to attend the sheer quantity of theatre on offer in 21st century Melbourne, and would likely see a greater amount of it than some Green Room judges do. There would be fewer problems with judges not having seen the nominees. Shows from the start of the year would not be disadvantaged, as critics could refer back to their reviews. And the independence required of a critic means that conflicts of interest would be far less likely to occur.

All of these factors would enhance the prestige, credibility and relevance of theatre awards, and with the internet broadening the pool of quality critics operating in Melbourne, there has never been a better time to institute a Critics Award for theatre. Apart from anything else, it would give the Green Rooms some much-needed competition.

 [This essay appeared in The Age, 26/3/12.]

Blogs, Trolls and Critics: The Rights and Wrongs of Negative Reviewing

February 17, 12 //  
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The Sh*t on your Play controversy has raged online over the last week, from Crikey to the Guardian theatre blog. Useful links to relevant comment can be found at Alison Croggon’s Theatre Notes. My contribution to the discussion, which appeared on the opinion page of The Age (16/2), is below.

*

The celebrated theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in his diaries: “90% of a critic’s job is to demolish the bad to make way for the good.” You could quibble over percentages, but there’s no question negative reviews are integral to arts criticism. They’re also great fun: bracing to write (Dr. Johnson liked to say writing in the negative mode put iron in his soul), and entertaining to read.

The dark art of the slag has made news twice in the last week. The inaugural Hatchet Job Award in the UK – a prize given “not to punish bad writing, but to reward brave, trenchant and learned reviewing” – went to Adam Mars-Jones for his spirited take-down of Michael Cunningham’s novel By Nightfall.

Closer to home, Australia’s independent online news site The Global Mail ran its first arts coverage, a profile by Stephen Crittenden of a Sydney theatre blogger who has been causing a stir in her hometown by ferociously panning theatre directors and companies. The blog is called ‘Sh*t On Your Play’. Its author was, until the profile, anonymous – the opposite of brave reviewing, one would have thought – but turns out to be Jane Simmons, a middle-aged drama teacher at an exclusive Anglican high school.

Simmons is one example of how the advent of blogging has changed the rules of the game for arts criticism. Not everyone is a critic, but blogs have opened the door to anyone with a passion for art to publish their opinions about it. The old model where artists made art, a handful of newspaper reviewers responded, and that was that, is being complemented by a discursive and at its best much more interesting approach. The result for Australian theatre is a diverse, voluble and usually fractious community of online commentators.

Yet Australia’s theatre bloggers were almost unanimous in their disapproval of Crittenden’s article, with good reason. His ignorance of the scene led him to profile a theatre troll, and uncritically accept her self-aggrandizing rants as somehow representative of what theatre blogs have to offer.

And Simmons has been, to this point, a troll rather than a critic. Why? As the Hatchet Job Award suggests – without bravery and learning, trenchancy in a reviewer is a valueless quality.

Take, for instance, Simmons’ dismissal of Simon Stone’s production of Brecht’s early play Baal, performed at the Malthouse last year. Whatever vulgar lustre might accrue from calling it a “dickfest” with “no point at all” is badly tarnished by such illiterate indulgences as: “I left the theatre more concerned about what to have for dinner than whatever message the play might have tried to imbibe.”

It is not smart to use words when you don’t know what they mean. (Imbibe means drink. A play can’t drink, and even if it could, it couldn’t drink a message; it’s a horribly mixed metaphor.) And it is hardly courageous to gild the lily just for the sake of showing off. All critics have egos, but such pride as we take in our work should stem from the satisfaction we get when our eloquence reflects our judgement as precisely as possible.

Simmons’ reviews are big on disgust, and small on argument. A good critic should always use how they felt about the art in question as a starting point. The bulk of a critic’s task lies in explaining why they felt that way. That requires a thorough knowledge of the work and its context, and the self-control to avoid getting side-tracked or carried away. Obviously, you’re not going to be able to do either effectively if the written word fails to obey you.

I don’t want to suggest that Simmons shouldn’t be as negative as she likes, and I have no sympathy for artists who complain that critical attacks are ‘too personal’ just because they’re vivid. What is true is that an irreverent voice, no matter how superficially attractive, isn’t enough to make you a critic.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of Simmons’ writing is that her relentless formula, which runs something like – “I couldn’t give a toss about this show. It’s the director’s fault. Pretentious wanker.” – risks hijacking genuine aesthetic debate, and confirming audience prejudice against all but tried and true theatre. It militates against the most difficult aspect of criticism – the role critics play in equipping audiences to appreciate challenging art, and in expanding their taste for novel pleasures.

Fortunately, the blogosphere has yielded many voices devoted to doing just that. The real issue in Australian theatre blogging today is the lack of money and institutional support to encourage and sustain the best arts criticism the internet has thrown up. If Crittenden had written about that, he might have more friends online. As it stands, he’s looking pretty lonely.

 

Another Essay On Criticism, Editor Unknown

September 30, 10 //  
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?!

Silence, mostly …

Authority? Don’t get me started …

There is a constant tussle between all the possibilities of human thought and between all the possibilities of a human mind’s sensitivity and between all the possibilities of a human character. – Thomas Bernhard, Walking – trans. Kenneth Northcott.

… “He said he had a voice once, a privileged one is what he said. He seemed anxious. I guess he was trying to work out which came first, the privilege or the voi…”

“… watched the blogosphere develop, lurking.  She claimed what she read on there, arts-wise, had inspired in her a profound sense of nausea. She didn’t look like she was kidding around either. She got this wild look in her eye, then grimaced and stared at me with a hatred so singular I had to look at my shoes …”

All is infected that the infected spy,
As all seems  yellow to the jaundiced eye.

Alexander Pope – An Essay On Criticism.

… all writing is like vomiting, really. Your mind’s muscle clenches, the words come out in a hot, desperate splurge, and you either feel better or worse afterwards (usually worse); sometimes, if you don’t feel better, you clench again, you have to barf again, and again - dare I say ad nauseam - until you’ve ralphed everywhere, blowing ideas in half-digested chunks all over your own personal ivory tower.

My tower, safe to say, is in dire need of a clean-up … seismic shifts in squalor; caught between tectonic plates: – trash, steaming piles of publicity material and books – many, many books - with titles like (glancing around) Works of Rabelais, Oblivion and The Hidden Journey: Melanoma Up Close And Personal …

* * *

Woman on the Tightrope

In her centre I could suspend my world, if I were not corrupted by academic learning. I could have used, misused her for my theories, taken her all the way, even before she became a possibility. For which both she and I lack the intelligence …

Thomas Bernhard, Amras – trans. Peter Jansen.

*  * *

… the problem is – the only way to clean your tower up is by hurling in a slightly different pattern, with bile fluid and distressing gobbets of regurgitate all cloying together in a manner that suggests slightly different stuff … I don’t know about you, but watching someone heaving their guts out makes me want to puke too …

It’s always like this. Even the best, spangled-with-eloquence, most maddeningly well-considered writing is this way …

***

What, in your view, is a conversation?

I don’t usually have them. To me people who want to have a conversation are suspect, because that raises particular expectations they’re unable to satisfy. Simple people are very good to talk with. When talking is supposed to become conversation, that’s when things get gruesome! That fine expression “everything under the sun.” It all gets thrown in together and then one person stirs this way, the other stirs that, and an unbearable stinking turd comes out the bottom. No matter who it is …

- from an Interview with Thomas Bernhard, 1986.

***

… Dialectic you say? Well, two’s company, but I rather think you knew what you were looking for in advance …

“A just decision is always required immediately, “right away”. It cannot furnish itself with infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. And even if it did have all that at its disposal, even if it did give itself the time, all the time and all the necessary facts about the matter, the moment of decision, as such, always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation, since it must not be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical knowledge, of this reflection or this deliberation … that must precede it.”

– Jacques Derrida, The Force of Law.

… language is chunderous. Criticism? Art? They both depend on (a) what kind of violence you’re willing to inflict … (xxy) what you had for breakfast … Deadline? Such a misleading word – what a deadline really is is a kind of wound, self-inflicted or forced upon us …

If you’re still reading this, you might have a distinct urge to spew. Or perhaps you’re just a bit squeamish about when the next ellipsis is going to arrive … So, what did you have for breakfast? … Hnnnnnnhhhhhhh. I’m speculating …

… even though you’re dead to me, I admire your fortitude. Especially those last two pars: self-indulgent, completely vile … gross generalisation and annoying, circular facete; imagining (and speaking for) other people in front of them, etc … your gag reflex has become inverted, i.e. you can’t stop the technicoloured yawn without conscious thought …

***

… also this weird notion that you couldn’t actually show anyone anything in critical mode, you had to tell them. That’s mimesis bad, diegesis good, for you pointy-headed types. A repellent idea. It was partly why most criticism that came out of universities at the time was so apocalyptically stupid and boring no one wanted to read it

… ities were where art went to die; critics were undertakers. It was important to arrange the body with meticulous …

… You’ve never heard of Godel? Well that’s that about that … even mathematics has a burning fleck at the back of its throat … He killed himself, you know, starved himself to death more or less. Walled himself in his study … ties in with what I was saying before, about immurement as capital punishment … What’s a professor when she’s at home? …

***

If we hear something, says Oehler, on Wednesday we check what we have heard and we check what we have heard until we have to say that what we have heard is not true, what we have heard is a lie. If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible. Thus throughout our lives we never escape from what is horrible and what is untrue, the lie, says Oehler. If we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous, what we are doing is something terribly hopeless and that what we are doing is in the nature of things obviously false. Thus every day becomes hell for us whether we like it or not, and what we think will, if we think about it, if we have the requisite coolness of intellect and acuity of intellect, always become something nasty, something low and superfluous which will depress us in the most shattering manner for the whole of our lives …

If our intellect is keen, if our thinking is the most ruthless and the most lucid, says Oehler, we are bound after the shortest space of time to say of everything that it is unbearable and horrible. There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible …

The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult, the art that is the most difficult. To exist against the facts means existing against what is unbearable and horrible, says Oehler. If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible space of time.

- Thomas Bernhard, Walking – trans. Kenneth Northcott.

1.d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5 4. Bg2 dxc4 5. Nf3 Be7 … Aha! A Catalan.

Auto-save? Jesus …

Criticism as Hand-maiden to Art? No no no. Pope is cute, but we’re not in Kansas anymore. People with jaundice don’t see yellow, by the way, they just appear yellow to others … yes, terribly self-conscious … Criticism? Art? Dance partners, maybe, cannibals at the same feast …

… an asymptotic relationship …

… complete the following sequence:   … >.>   … <.<  … >.< …