Clive Barnes: It won’t be the same without you
Too late we get around to noting the passing of Clive Barnes, the urbane, entertaining and zestful dance and theater critic who died Nov. 19, at age 81, from liver cancer.
Barnes, who arrived from England to become dance critic at the New York Times in 1965 (he added theater to his duties two years later) was truly a working critic: He was still filing reviews to the New York Post two weeks before he died.
A friend in New York who knows I rarely see the Post passes along this warm and truly lovely tribute from his friend and Post colleague Michael Riedel; may we all deserve such a sendoff when our own time comes. Deborah Jowitt’s memory of Barnes in the Village Voice is worth reading, too.
Riedel says Barnes was deeply influenced in his early days by the mercurial and brilliant British critic Kenneth Tynan, and that explains a lot: the passion, the omnivorian taste, the wordplay, the ability to follow his own opinions wherever they might lead him, the sense of fun. It was Barnes who, in a review for the Times of a production of “As You Like It” whose cast included Meat Loaf, famously referred to the rock star on second reference as “Mr. Loaf.”
For nine years, as lead critic in both dance and theater for the Times, Barnes held the country’s most powerful critic’s chair in two disciplines. In 1977, when the Times ordered him to choose one or the other, he instead bolted from the Pillar to the Post, accepting the tabloid’s offer to let him keep writing about both. And there he stayed, no longer in the Times spotlight but free to do what he wanted.
I met Barnes only once, and so briefly that it hardly counts. It was a dance concert in New York, on a night when the New York critics were out in force, a coalescence that can have deadly effect. At intermission the mass of critics rushed to the lobby and began lobbying one another, feeling each other out for their opinions, trying out lines on each other for possible use in their reviews later that night. Barnes stood, not aloof, but apart from the crowd, infinitely genial, greeting when greeted, but not taking part in the tribal ritual. He was, as Riedel notes, “ever a gentleman”: pleased, briefly and apparently genuinely, to meet a writer from the hinterlands. Professionally, the show was inside his mind. You got the feeling that he simply didn’t care what anyone else thought. He would end up writing what he thought (as it turned out he liked the program, while recognizing it was no barn-burner) and that was that.
And isn’t that the way it ought to be?
November 25th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
I last saw Clive Barnes in March, at the Joyce Theatre in NY where nearly every NY critic was present at a performance by Kansas City Ballet, mostly I opined to the critic (now unemployed) from the Kansas City Star because they were performing a Twyla Tharp work not seen very often. We had a brief conversation about the two American dancers I’m writing about, Janet Reed and Todd Bolender and he wished me luck with my project. I have mixed emotions about him–he is certainly one of the people who professionalized dance criticism both in this country and in England. But he also wrote a fairly lengthy rant some years ago deploring the state of dance criticism on the grounds that most of the practitioners (and here I quote) were “dried up menopausal women” who couldn’t properly appreciate male dancers. This was kind of irritating. Nevertheless, I hope you have an aisle seat wherever you are and that the celestial performance is eternally a good one.
November 25th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Well, perhaps not ALWAYS a gentleman! I don’t blame you for being irritated, Martha. As you know, all of us in this racket have committed insanely stupid comments to print (and, in the Internet age, to the ether). I’ve broken a glass house or two myself. Usually, without fully realizing my stupidity/insensitivity until it was already in print. We write, therefore, we spread blight.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:47 am
You’re right, you’re right, oh spreader of blight, and one should not of course speak ill of the gathered. He was pretty annoyed with me, as it happens, thought it wasn’t my fault: he couldn’t get to the Bournonville Festival in 2005 until two performances had already been done, so I was assigned a review of those by Dance Magazine and he reviewed the rest. Because of timing, my review landed in the hard copy of the magazine and his on the net, and you know what? I still feel guilty about that. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving let us be grateful for our colleagues when they get it right, grateful when WE get it right, and above all give thanks for the artists who tolerate our foibles and inaccuracies, not to mention giving us hours of pleasure in the theater!