Clement Crisp on the role of the critic

Not a prophet, not a missionary, and certainly not the publicist that some managements quaintly suppose him to be, the critic is a recording eye, and even in these days of technological gadgetry, sometimes the only one. We meet here an arrière pensée that must occur to a writer on dance: that his words may be - as the past has proved - all that remains of a work of art; that his parasitic comment will outlive the creative body on which it fed.

This impermanence of ballet suggests a certain scholarly function for the critic, one imposed upon him by the evanescence of the art he serves. A ballet dies at curtain fall. It is resuscitated at its next performance, but unlike music or drama that are securely fixed in a printed text, which is an undeviating matter for interpretation, dance is eroded as performer follows performer. Incrustations of misapprehension, incorrect muscular timing, even more incorrect emotional reading, barnacle the text. It can thus become part of a critic's duty to be guardian of a work's proprieties as he understands them. This may sound arrogant, but harsh experience in the theatre has shown how easily ballets are distorted by new interpreters, as by repetition, and how easily such change becomes accepted and sanctioned as correct. (I recall leaving a theatre with John Cranko after a performance of his Pineapple Poll when he had not supervised it in rehearsal for some years. He asked: "I wonder who choreographed that ballet?")

"The Nature of Dance Scholarship: The Critic's Task" by Clement Crisp in Dance Research, Vol 1, No 1, Page 6.