Time Out New York theatre critic David Cote issues a call for theatre bloggers to start throwing more punches:
This item will generate noise (and that’s the point): I wish bloggers would mix it up more. Does it take a Rachel Corrie fiasco to generate heat? The theater blogosphere has been dull, insular and quiet lately. We need more arguments, more dirt, more bloody knock-down-drag-out fights. Not just self-promotion, obscure manifestos and production diaries. And here’s hoping for a new breed of long-form critics worth reading.
Director and theatre blogger Isaac Butler responds, pointing out the (I'd thought obvious) reasons why that can't really happen -- at least not for theatre bloggers who are also theatre professionals who value comity and working again, ever:
Let's say that I want to write a post attempting to engage/enrage and enter into a knock-down drag out fight about New York theatre. At this point, in order for me to do this, I would probably have to end up attacking someone who is at most 2-3 degrees removed from myself. I've been writing about and engaging in the NYC theatre scene for awhile now and everyone knows everyone and I'm not exactly at a point in my career where I can afford to go pissing people off willy-nilly. So my choices become: attack a peer (or their work) or attack a larger theater (or their work). Shit where I live or fuck up my career. Those are the choices. [...]
Not being an idiot, and not enjoying bad either/or scenarios, I tend not to post blog posts that will fall into those categories. It's not that I don't think about those things, or have those conversations with friends. To give one example: A major off-Broadway theatre put up a play earlier this year that was clearly unfinished and not ready for production on a script level. Everyone who saw it that I talked to knew it. Several of the people I talked to about it were bloggers. But we talked about in a bar. Not on the internet. I don't really want to go slagging off a show where the director and light designer were both friends of mine to the end of... what, exactly? It's not like the theater's lit manager is going to write in in my comments and engage with me on the issue of their shitty new work program that does plays that aren't ready for prime time. For what it's worth, I tried to corner their lit manager at the TCG conference so that I could ask him about it, but couldn't find him.
Anyway, the point is is that I have to think at least a little bit strategically here. So this blog won't always say all the shit that goes through my head. Every now and then I gotta hold back.
This is something I think every artist who keeps a blog struggles with. Nobody wants to read stuff that's entirely cheerleading, especially if that cheerleading is insincere. Conflict is what gets people's attention. (A lot of people first encountered this here blog back when Ethan Iverson and I went at it over seventies Miles.) God knows I've been critical in this space before, though I've tried to pick my targets carefully, and be respectful, productive, and transparent about where I am coming from. I'm not saying what we really need is more blood feuds, but I do think it's a problem if our scene is perceived to be so fragile that the slightest criticism will cause it to shatter into a million pieces.
Because, you know, a big part of what's made the indie rock blogosphere so influential is that people over there aren't afraid to mix it up. This is especially true for a band that gets a lot of blog-love, like (say) the Dirty Projectors -- when that happens, there are bound to be malcontents, and the ensuing knock-down drag-out fights are, I think, ultimately good for the music. (You had a similar dynamic with the controversy surrounding The Bad Plus when they first started attracting attention -- or, for that matter, Ornette Coleman, or the original beboppers.)
But the difference is that the indie rock blogosphere -- unlike the theatre 'sphere, the jazz 'sphere, or the new music 'sphere -- consists primarily of "civilians," not other indie rock artists. And because our scenes are so much smaller and more collaborative (and, okay, insular), artists being openly critical of their peers is one of those things that is Not Done. These days, it's easy to feel like the art form itself is seriously under attack, and people are looking to circle the wagons. So then when someone fires inward, the "whoa, they actually went there" factor means such criticism carries a much more painful sting than it would if we all routinely threw sharp elbows at each other. It also invites significant blowback for the critic, who risks developing a reputation as someone who is not a good citizen of his or her artistic community.
And so generally, we talk about it in a bar -- unless it's something like, say, Doctor Atomic, or Popcorn Superhet Receiver or the like, something or someone so high-profile that they can stand a little heat from the rest of us. ("Punch up, not down.") And yeah, this might make our blogs somewhat less exciting and controversial -- but if it's a choice between that versus shitting where we live and/or fucking up our careers? And also: would our scene really be healthier, overall, if everyone was more brutally, ruthlessly forthright about work they hated? I'm honestly not sure.
Irish bassist and blogger Ronan Guilfoyle observes that the current more-or-less mandatory display of collegiality tweren't always necessarily so:
And I recently discovered some fantastic writing on jazz by jazz musicians from over fifty years ago – from the pages of a magazine called ‘The Jazz Review’. This was a magazine founded by Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams, and Hsio Wen Shih in New York in 1958 and the standard of writing in it is of an extraordinarily high level. One of its innovations was to invite jazz musicians to review the work of other jazz musicians. [...]
One thing that’s fascinating about their writing is how frank they are about the work of other musicians with whom they must also have been meeting on a social level in the New York scene at the time – yet they pull no punches when describing what they like and what they don’t like. For example Cannonball’s description of what he sees as Tony Scott’s strengths and weaknesses is of a level of outspokenness that you’d never see today, since we now all love each other – at least in print!
Via Ronan, here is the link where you can download (in PDF form) back issues of The Jazz Review.
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