Waiting 10 minutes for someone to defecate onstage is boring in the way that waiting 10 minutes for someone to produce a double pirouette or high C would be boring.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
LIKE THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, ONLY WITHOUT THE OTHER TWO PEOPLE. ALSO, WITHOUT ... Any connoisseur of negative reviews will appreciate this Alastair Macaulay review of a performance by "dancer" Ann Liv Young in tomorrow's Times. I'll just offer one sentence as a sample:
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/arts/design/12young.html
ReplyDelete"Mr. Bedoya said he had never received an explanation from the museum. Nor did Ms. Young, who fell in the darkness, cutting her knee and spilling a bucket of her own urine on herself and several audience members. Yet Ms. Young and others consider her performance a success."
And here's an option for our single New York readers: $50 (and a release form) to have a date with "Sherry." http://www.annlivyoung.com/sherrydatepage.html
ReplyDeleteWow. Um. Yeah, just wow.<span> </span>
ReplyDeleteThis show is sh*t because she didn't sh*t.
ReplyDeleteHow does this stuff even merit a review in the first place? More importantly, who pays someone to come and literally crap on their stage?
ReplyDeleteMr. Show, of course, anticipated all this well in advance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPTtwImlvYI
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm surprised hasn't come up is that the critic left early in disgust, and discloses having done so in the review. It raises an interesting question--does a critic have an obligation to stay through the whole thing (or read the whole thing in the case of a book)? Here, I agree it's unlikely anything could have salvaged the "performance," but is there an obligation to see if there was some surprise ending?
ReplyDeleteI've long prided myself on never having walked out of a movie, and until recently (that is, until I started getting old and falling asleep during rentals that fail to hold my interest), I always finished the movies I started. I've seen a LOT of terrible and even reprehensible movies. Now I'm just a guy, and not a professional critic. But I'd have walked out on this, and I don't fault the critic one bit.
ReplyDeleteI mean, doesn't the disclosure that he walked out tell you everything, as a reader of the review, that you need to know?
ReplyDeleteAs a single New Yorker, thanks, but no thanks.♠
ReplyDeleteI'm fine with the critic walking out, as long as the critic states that s/he did so.
ReplyDeleteI'm not okay with the critic walking out. John Simon used to do it when he reviewed for New York, and it would drive me crazy - he would cover Act II by asking other people what they thought. It's lazy. The job of a critic is to review the whole piece - something incredible, or awful, could happen in the second act, or last ten minutes, or a performer could appear who's only in the last scene. Not only is the critic being paid to stay, but he or she owes it to the reading audience to review the entire experience - at the very least, so WE know if we'll want to walk out, or if there's anything worth staying for. A paying audience has the option to walk out, but I think a critic is obliged to stay to review the entire performance, regardless of their distaste or dislike.
ReplyDeleteYeah, like at the last minute, just when you think she can't defecate, she might defecate! And readers of the New York Times would never know the story of a triumphant onstage defecation by a previously constipated dancer.
ReplyDeleteOh, shit -- SPOILER ALERT.
I've now spent way too much time on this woman's Facebook page.
ReplyDeleteSue, I think there's a huge difference between being a lazy critic (which is what it sounds like you're describing with John Simon) and, in a rare case, walking out as the most emphatic form of criticism. I don't agree at all with the former -- it almost sounds like he was leaving early to make deadline, or just couldn't be bothered to see the performances through. But sometimes there's really no better way to tell your readers what an unprofessional debacle something is than by saying, essentially: "You know what? I was there as a dance critic and saw one 'dance' number, which I found pretty lame. I hated the rest of the show so much that I walked out when the performer, having wasted a considerable amount of the audience's time (or all of it, really), left to perform off stage something she had planned to perform on stage. YMMV, and may the gods of plenty of fiber smile upon you if you go."
ReplyDelete