Dec 23, 2024 etc
When I think of arts criticism in Aotearoa, I think of two pieces Simon Wilson wrote for Metro a decade ago. One was a good, old-fashioned, cast-iron pan that ended up being the final word on the show; the other was an unadulterated rave, part of a wave of audience enthusiasm that launched a show to international acclaim.
In the former, Simon Wilson wrote of Red Leap Theatre’s lyrical climate change warning Sea: “There’s a big hole where its beating heart ought to be, and the best it can hope for is to be pretty… I specially don’t recommend you take children. You’ll put them off theatre. And turn them into environmental cynics. Mind you, that’s probably true for adults too.”
The show never had a second season.
In the latter, Wilson wrote of Bullet Heart Club’s love-story-slash-New-Zealand-jukebox-cabaret Daffodils: “[It] should play all over the country. It should play all over the world. It resonates so strongly as a piece of our own mixed-up, precious culture, it should be our new national flag.”
Both shows were reviewed by other publications, including the New Zealand Herald, Theatreview, Theatre Scenes, The Pantograph Punch and The Lumière Reader. The theatre community didn’t just talk about these two shows, they talked about how they were received. Links were thrown around DMs accompanied by ‘Have you read this?!’ or ‘We have to see this!’ As criticism, online and in print, flourished, so did theatre.
Criticism is different now. Where artists once hoped for a great review, now they hope to be reviewed at all. The days after a show’s opening used to see artists googling their show name plus ‘review’ and waiting for the results to pour in; now, a confirmed review might appear well after a show closes, if it appears at all. There’s also no guarantee that, if a work is reviewed, it’ll be by an appropriate reviewer — someone who has experience with the artform, lived experience with the show’s material, and the ability to communicate their opinion effectively in writing.
Some forms today are better served than others. Books, films and TV are reviewed comparatively en masse by both professionals and amateurs, with more casual word of mouth building on the foundation of crafted, considered critique. A winning combination can still turn a book like Greta & Valdin or a TV show like After the Party into a genuine phenomenon. It helps that these art forms are available more or less in perpetuity, whereas a live show is rarely on for longer than the publicity campaign that precedes it.
The landscape may have been a little better when I started writing reviews of theatre and film nearly 15 years ago, but even then there weren’t a huge number of platforms that would actually regularly publish them, let alone pay the writer a decent wage for writing them. Of the publications I wrote for, one was a student magazine (Craccum), two no longer exist (The Lumière Reader and The Pantograph Punch), and at the last I would work pieces of criticism around other articles (The Spinoff). Of all these publications, The Pantograph Punch was the only one that regularly reviewed theatre and was acknowledged as a place where audiences would go to read reviews.
There are numerous extra tensions when it comes to arts criticism in New Zealand. Many of our best critics are artists themselves, writing about friends — and potentially enemies. An artist writing a harsh piece of criticism runs the risk of cutting off professional opportunities, of being seen as throwing bricks from the outside rather than being part of the ‘scene’.
Even worse, they may make someone mad whom they might soon see in person, creating an awkward social environment. I believe the fear of this last repercussion is largely overblown. In my 15 years, I’ve written more than 100 reviews and can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I’ve written about who no longer look me in the eye. Most people are content simply to talk about a negative review behind the backs of the people involved.
On the other hand, a review that treats the art in question entirely positively can be seen as pandering or lacking in objectivity. Conflicts of interest abound, and often the artist-reviewer must decide for themselves if they’re too close to a certain work, or worker involved, to critique it. If Aotearoa is small, the arts community is even smaller. These conflicts can also be a way for a work to dodge critical drubbing entirely — if a bad show opens and nobody writes about it, did it actually happen? And if it never happened, how bad could it have really been?
Another tension that exists, in our community and worldwide, is that between lived experience and artform knowledge. This one is more difficult to resolve without falling in favour of one or the other. Artists want responses from people who actually understand their work or, if they don’t understand it, are at least open to engaging with it. They want their work to be appreciated.
A critic with lived experience, perhaps because they come from the community that created the work or that the work aimed to engage with, has one kind of appreciation. There are intentions, choices, moments that can speak more loudly to them than to other members of the audience. This can occur even if the production nuances of the work, the context it exists in and the craft that comes to bringing it to the screen, stage or page are out of their usual sphere of knowledge.
A reviewer with experience of and knowledge in the artform has a different kind of appreciation. They might be able to identify where a work sits in the history of the form or where it is doing something new. They might also be able to appreciate the effort or decisions behind certain choices. But the cultural specificities of the work might be lost on them, which can lead to the reviewer’s authority on the artform obscuring or eclipsing crucial information.
Finally, but crucially, there is the reviewer who simply communicates their opinion, informed or otherwise, with clarity. The reviewer who comes in unburdened with lived experience or institutional knowledge, but knows and can describe what they like and don’t like, what they respond to and don’t. It is perhaps these reviewers who fill the bulk of Aotearoa’s dry critical scene.
In its purest form, criticism builds a bridge between art and audience, creating more understanding. All three of these reviewer types can build such bridges, to varying extents.
Writing a great review is a craft; it comes from practice and rigour. Lived experience is no substitute for knowledge of the artform, just as understanding of the artform is no substitute for lived experience. Neither is a substitute for knowing how to communicate an opinion concisely, memorably, with crystal-clear intent.
In a dream world, our arts scenes would be full of critics with lived experience, deep knowledge of the craft they’re writing about, the ability to communicate their own opinion to an audience and a fearlessness while talking about work. But we don’t live in a dream world. Not even close. A scene full of reviewers who carried at least one of those qualities, filling gaps of understanding where others can’t, would be preferable to what we have now.
The conditions aren’t there to create those reviewers anymore.
Criticism, where it is practised in this country by mainstream publications, is still largely carried out by the establishment. Over the past 15 years, the award for Best Reviewer at the Canon then Voyager Media Awards has been given out 11 times, each time to Pākehā recipients — six times to men; five times to women (including a year where two women won jointly), with Charlotte Grimshaw taking out three of those wins. This year there was no award at all, the reviewing category seemingly subsumed into “Best Columnist, Opinion or Critique”, and still it went to a Pākehā man.
Reviews, especially for live performance, are done on a freelance basis, often unpaid or amongst other writing work. There are many writers around who could review but lack the platform, desire or privilege to spend the time to do so. The question, of course, is about who wants to invest to fill this gap. New Mirrors, a report resulting from research carried out by Rosabel Tan and Dr James Wenley on behalf of Creative New Zealand, about challenges within the current arts and culture media ecosystem, offered recommendations that feel like distant goals. These include a specialised fund for arts and culture media and an Arts Media Centre to act as an educational hub similar to the Science Media Centre, which aims to bridge the gap between journalists and researchers to better represent science in the media.
As both an artist and a journalist, I worry about where the money for either will come from. Should the media sector be able to draw on funding set aside for the arts and culture sector? Do we have the writers and creators who could create and curate this media? And finally, sadly, would anybody consume this media if it was there?
Who suffers when good criticism doesn’t exist? Artists, obviously — though few critics write reviews with the intention that they act as feedback for the artist rather than a response for the audience. History is affected too, as mentioned by journalist Charlie Gates in the New Mirrors report: “Often a review is the only record that is left of a piece of theatre.” I imagine this is becoming true for more artforms — TV shows that never get written about, exhibitions that come and go, dance works that pop up for three days and then never again. Criticism doesn’t just exist for the present, it exists to preserve the present into the future.
But the people who suffer most are the audiences. Criticism exists primarily for the audience. A good piece of critical text exists alongside a piece of art, shining another light on it. It deepens appreciation and understanding, and puts the work in context. But that single spotlight is not the dream. The dream is a kaleidoscope of responses, the beams of different lights illuminating different perspectives and highlighting different aspects of the work. Right now, we’re lucky to get one dim light per piece of work.
