I first met Marina Harss during the summer of 2019 at a mutual friend’s dinner party. I had just graduated from college and I believe, that evening, I was wearing a red dress. I must confess, when we met, I didn’t know of Marina’s work. Surely I had read her pieces in The Times, but before I thought to take notice of the writer’s name. At the time, Marina was at work on a book that eventually became The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet, which was published by FSG in October 2023. I had happened to have seen Ratmansky’s new production of The Sleeping Beauty for ABT a few days before during which I was quite confused. I sat next to an older couple and during intermission we all made eye contact. They quietly asked me if I knew what was happening.“There isn’t a lot of dancing,” I responded. The production was mentioned at the mutual friend’s dinner and I, without missing a beat, declared out loud that I hated it only to be informed of the subject of Marina’s book. I probably gulped and aired on the side of silence (hard for me) for the rest of the evening until later when the subject of tattoos came up, particularly the topic of teardrop shaped-tattoos on faces to which Marina replied “there’s a principal dancer at New York City Ballet with one.” My head shot in her direction and we made eye contact as we uttered the name of the dancer with said face adornment: “Sebastien Marcovici!” I had seemed to have found, that fateful evening in May in the West Village, a friend with whom I shared a lingua franca.
I studied ballet as a child, and though I was quite serious about it emotionally, the potential of my technical prowess was limited by biology– I did not have the feet– and life expectations. Devoting the amount of time necessary to become something slightly close to proficient– ballet is very very hard– would mean altering my educational trajectory. I am the daughter of two doctors and part-time schooling was never going to be an option. But, because I grew up in New York City, I had a disproportionate access to two of the finest ballet companies in the world. After the requisite viewing of The Nutcracker– an experience I still remember mostly for the chinese meal my family shared at the now defunct Olie’s on 67th and Broadway– and then a program of American Ballet Theater at New York City Center that included The Green Table and Sinatra Suite (it is here reader that I feel deeply in love with the principal dancer Angel Corella), my ballet viewing became possible by way of my sister. She is seven years older and in possession of a season subscription, which were much cheaper in those days.
One day when I was in fourth grade, a friend of my sister’s unexpectedly canceled, and she took me as her date instead. After that, she continued to take me. Particularly notable performances included Philip Neal’s 2010 retirement performance, the first time I saw Serenade, and the first time I saw Geroge Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante danced by Megan Fairchild after her year-long hiatus from City Ballet. She was simultaneously expansive and so precise, precise in her expansiveness! I think I cried. This access to dance– beyond ballet, our mother ensured we saw things across genres including the last performance of The Merce Cunningham Company at BAM where Merce, at 89, was wheeled on stage for bows– allowed me to enter into a world of ideas and analysis that far surpassed my own ability to physicalize the very thing I was thinking about and analyzing. With age, the knowledge and passion for the subject only grew. Years after my regular ballet classes stopped, I still went to the ballet all the time, immersed myself in the world of choreography, poured over videos, learned about the intricacies of repertories, and listened to scores. Meeting Marina was meeting someone else who could engage in the knowledge I cherished so dearly. Like spotted like.
I don’t remember when I saw Marina next. I believe she invited me to go to the ballet with her and I nearly plotzed at the prospect of going to the ballet with a critic. She continued to invite me and over the years our casual viewing together developed into a friendship. At this point I was reading her work closely and couldn’t believe I knew someone who wrote for publications that I’d watched the grownups in my life read for my whole childhood. Meanwhile, as my twenties meandered on, while trying out every possible combination of employment I could think of, I took notice of how often I seemed to want to discuss dance, art, and culture, in professional settings. I taught American History for a year and for the “Colonial American” unit, I screened videos of Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring. Unable to miss an opportunity to discuss New York City Ballet, I referenced Balanchine’s Four Temperaments when The Four Humors appeared in the students’ textbook.
Some time in this stew of passing years– I was 26– I decided I wouldn’t go to law school, the professional outcome I deemed inevitable: it was medicine, but with words. I came to realize, I might find being the only lawyer constantly thinking about Leonard Bernstein alienating. I was working at a law firm when a colleague sent me the first episode of a podcast about Balanchine. I am very sensitive about the treatment of ballet outside in media. I attribute this to my eighth-grade horror at Black Swan. I listened to the first episode of the podcast in my apartment in Bed Stuy and found myself unable to stop yelling every time the host said something inaccurate. I, a person incapable of not torturing myself, listened to the entire series. I seemed to recognize a lot of the guests on her podcasts–some were writers I admired, others were dancers I’d studied with– and these people, mostly women, didn’t sound like themselves. The audio had been seriously edited. The podcast was so inaccurate, so poorly constructed, and so unnuanced, I felt I could not sit with my frustration that bordered on anger. I decided I would write a response to it. This led me to CULTUREBOT and the eventual publication of the piece titled Sure, Critique Ballet and Balanchine, but Erika Lantz Does It Wrong. Though the piece, like every project I take on, took me ages to write, I was ecstatic at the ability to articulate a perspective about a subject matter I hold so dear. It was the first experience that made me realize that thinking seemed to matter a lot to me and that I’d like to be able to do something with that thinking. This is also my earliest exposure to dramaturgy: what made me so upset was the blatant dismissal of context. My first piece led to another and then another, and then to editing for the site. But, before that, I confided in Marina that I was doing this, and then after the publication of the podcast response, over dinner, I admitted to her that I wanted to write, and that I had many ideas I’d like to pursue. It was truly an admission. I felt foolish admitting this to a publishing writing and following so closely in her path, but her response was completely untroubled. She told me to pursue it.
It has been some time since these early days. Since then, I’ve been in graduate school twice– Marina wrote me a letter of recommendation for the second iteration– and while I am far from where I want to be as a writer, Marina has remained a consistent support in my life, and a consistent source of inspiration. I look at her career, her discipline, her focus, and her ability with awe and admiration.
I now see it as quite fitting that I didn’t know much of Marina’s career when I met her. It seems to me that the cursory understanding of what a critic was, was equivalent to my cursory awareness that my many years of viewing could actually be meaningful for something. The more time I spent with Marina, the more I became aware of her profession. She, perhaps without meaning to, showed me a way.
Below is our transcribed conversation from our public conversation that took place this past January at Pluto’s Loft, the home of some dear friends. The publication of this conversation– an interview of Marina attempting to decode dance and illuminate the logistics of her career, there are a few moments where Marina starts to interview me! – coincides with my decision to leave CULTUREBOT as co-editor. Over the past three years, I’ve had the great privilege to immerse myself in the world of performance writing and thinking. I’ve gotten to work with many brilliant minds and hearts, and gained a proximity to the beating pulse of performance in New York City. If I understood that arts writing and criticism was essential before, I leave knowing it to be vital. I am glad to have contributed to efforts to sustain deep thought and engagement as media turns towards the short-form.
This conversation had been edited for both length and clarity, though I’m sorry I wasn’t able to include audience questions. There was a great moment where Marina and I bonded over annoying fellow audience members for our propensity to move along with the dancing in our seats. While I won’t be working on CULTUREBOT directly, I will still contribute. My hope is, in true Marina fashion, to write without abandon. Luckily she’s only a text away should anything go awry!
Eve Bromberg: Hello, Marina!
Marina Harss: Hi! It’s been so long!
EB: I know… it’s almost as if we barely know each other! I’m going to start by reading Marina’s latest review from the opening of City Ballet’s winter season because it’s titled Con Brio, and if you know Marina’s work, you know Brio is an often-used Harsian term.
MH: Oh god.
EB: Without further ado.. “Programming, programming. The opening night program at New York City Ballet was on the long side, but what a trio of works: Serenade and Prodigal Son by Balanchine, followed by Ratmansky’s restating of the Grand Pas from Paquita (now thankfully performed without the addendum of Balanchine’s Minkus Pas de Trois). Serenade is such a powerful way to begin the season: the sweep and drama of it takes the breath away. Megan Fairchild, approaching retirement, is in her element in the “Russian” role, which is mostly allegro—lightness and speed are her domain. Emily Gerrity looked stronger and more expansive than I’ve seen in months; her arabesque, as she was partnered by Davide Riccardo, received well-deserved applause from an enthusiastic audience. In Prodigal Son, Anthony Huxley was a youthful, but too polite Prodigal. He dances the role beautifully, as he does everything, but doesn’t register much as a character. Miriam Miller, in contrast, is an extraordinary Siren who infuses the part with a kind of melancholy coolness. The closer, Paquita, is a feast of classical steps, driven along by Ludwig Minkus’ faux Spanish (actually quite Viennese-sounding) score. The strength of the staging lies in the juicy, embodied style of dancing, full of changes of direction, of level (low, medium, high), of angle of the shoulders and head. As well as in the way the corps amplifies the movements of the soloist woman. On opening night, the ensembles looked a bit rough (not enough rehearsal?), with some spacing issues and inconsistent epaulement, but the overall effect was still thrilling. Several solos stood out. Dominika Afanasenkov, for example, in a slow waltz that begins like a prayer, with huge enveloppés followed by a diagonal of tiny steps, made more beautiful by the angle and twist of her upper body. Emily Kikta’s boldness in her “entrechat and bend” solo. Mira Nadon thrilled in the different facets of the lead role, soft and wafting at the start of one solo, only to eat up space in huge soaring cabrioles (and later, even larger saut de basques), demonstrating balance, control, and freedom in equal measure. A little girl in the audience cheered, jumping up and down. She knew what she was seeing. Such beauty seems even more valuable now, as the civilized world reels.”
Marina, how many years into your career are you? So?
MH: First of all, thank you Eve. Thank you, JD! Thank you all for being here and yes, the civilized world reels. Today we have another example of that in Minneapolis where ICE has shot [Alex Pretti] another person. So art is happening in the background of a really dramatic time, and we’re all trying to figure out where it all fits in together. Sometimes ballet can be this incredible escape, and also a suggestion that there is beauty still in this world to be to be seen, enjoyed, and striven for.
I started writing about dance. I can’t quite pinpoint the date, but it was a little over 20 years ago when I was working as a fact checker at The New Yorker magazine. So it’s been maybe like 25 years? The fact checking that I did for The New Yorker actually played an important part in my writing because I worked closely with the late Joan Accocella, who was for many years The New Yorker dance critic. So in a way, it was through working with her, seeing dance through her eyes, and sometimes actually having the good fortune of going to see dance with her, that the whole idea of thinking very closely and intensely about dance and writing about it formed in my mind.
EB: Could you speak to what was so distinct about Joan’s writing?
MH: I also want to ask the same about you, Eve because you also write about dance. We’ll get to you after, after Joan. Joan had this incredible ability to make dance writing feel very plain spoken. She could take the most complex and heady piece of choreography and make it immediate and unpretentious and comprehensible, while still being vivid. I know, David Remnick describes her writing like writing about a boxing match. There’s something so direct, visceral, and uncomplicated about the way she described it that made you feel like you could understand it, that anybody could understand it. But at the same time she was incredibly sophisticated. She was showing you the connection between what you’d seen on stage and a book, or movie, or poem. She had this huge frame of reference, but at the end of the day, it was the ease with which she wrote that tricked you into thinking there wasn’t art to it, but there was enormous art to the way she wrote.
EB: And before you started writing about dance, how familiar with dance were you?
MH: I am as familiar as anybody who was kind of interested in the arts in general. I knew more about music because I studied music as a kid and pretty seriously through college, but I had a secondary interest in dance.
EB: Something that I hear a lot from people who are less familiar with dance is a confusion about what to look for and what to watch. What was it like to become familiar with the tradition, and how did you learn to both engage with dance and then critique it?
MH: I think what happened was I started going to see New York City Ballet and specifically ballets by George Balanchine, and talking about them with Joan and reading her reviews, and then I started to become excited by the way the choreography showed, explained, and augmented the experience of hearing the music. A piece of music that was familiar may start to feel more complicated. Whereas a piece of music like Stravinsky’s Agon, which is very difficult to listen to on its own, could become more comprehensive by seeing it as choreography. It was like somebody was helping you to see the inner workings of the music and helping you to find dramatic aspects of the music that were not immediately audible if you just listened to it. In addition to that, beyond the structural and musical illumination, there was this drama under the surface. Even though these often weren’t story ballets, the way Balanchine created a kind of an underlying dramaturgy, and stakes– the music has stakes and the way people interact with each other, the way the soloists interact with each other or with the core creates a unity– a story starts to surface. It often isn’t laid out for you. You have to figure it out on your own.
EB: It’s almost ecological.
MH: But wait, how did you get interested in dance?
EB: How did I get interested in dance? Well, my sister is here. I got interested in dance because my sister studied dance, so I followed her example.
MH: You actually danced?
EB: Yes, actually danced. I did ballet for many years. But, in addition because we grew up in New York, we supplemented technique classes with going to see live performances. So from a very young age, my sister was taking me to see the ballet, and like you, I became familiar through the work of Balanchine. His work seemed to me to represent what people talk about when they talk about the effect of art. I remember seeing Serenade by Balanchine for the first time. It’s a significant ballet for being almost a pedagogical piece. Balanchine made it on students. It’s very essential in terms of City Ballet’s repertory and Balanchine’s oeuvre. I remember seeing that, I think it was for Philip Neal’s retirement in 2010, and being swept up in how the movement replicated the feeling of the music. It was this extraordinary experience. I suppose my experience before that would have been narrative ballet, and Serenade seemed to surpass any need of story. It was intellectually challenging, and I found that really exciting.
MH: How did you make the transition, and why did you make the transition from dancing to writing about dance?
EB: Well, I think a lot of people who study ballet have the experience of realizing they will probably will never become professional, because the sort of margin of error to be a professional is extremely narrow, and it’s very hard to continue studying it seriously without professional aspirations. You end up finding yourself in this very kind of weird situation where you want to be serious about it and dedicate yourself to it, but without any guaranteed outcome. And also, you end up in this strange position of choosing between ballet and an education because if you want to pursue ballet professionally, you more or less have to stop going to school. It was never going to be the case that my parents would let me stop going to high school in order to study ballet. So, dancing more or less phased out in my life, naturally. But, I always continued to see it. My intellectual attachment to ballet outlived and surpassed my actual technical ability.
MH: Physical embodied.
EB: Yeah, so the transition to writing was natural because I had all this working knowledge of the art form, and realized I could maybe do something with it. I’m currently studying dramaturgy, and one of the reasons I became interested in the subject is because of Balanchine. I learned what dramaturgy is from Balanchine ballets, and I think he may in fact be the world’s greatest dramaturg, because his ballets have these almost sacrosanct internal logics that can exist without narrative. I saw that from a very young age, that these ballets seem to know themselves and that no decisions seemed random, which is surely because of his relationship to the music.
Okay, back to you. When you started seeing dance, and I want to mention genres beyond ballet, what was your initial engagement like? Similarly, ballet is such a physically impressive art form. Did you go through a period of having to almost become desensitized to technical prowess, to be able to look beyond the high leg and multiple pirouettes?
MH: Well, I don’t know if you really have to, I mean, not to harp on Joan, but she loved the male dancers of ABT for example. She found the bravoura to be incredibly exciting. So, I think it’s okay to love the things that the dancers can do. It’s part of the experience of dance, right? It’s like seeing a great pianist too. You’re not just impressed by their musical choices, but the domination of the instrument. The ability to coax out incredible colors from the instrument. And the same thing is true with dancers. Not just ballet dancers. There are incredible dancers of so many different genres with an ability to show you the choreography and extend your idea of what’s physically possible. Not just in terms of how big their movements are, but also how subtle, how much detail, how much contrast. All of that happens from great training, talent, devotion, intelligence, and also, most importantly taste. At the beginning, maybe you go and you’re just so thrilled by some of the things that dancers can do that you’re not as aware of whether the choreography is actually good, but I always had strong feelings and responses to the work. Everything is subjective, right? I wasn’t necessarily saying this is good, something else was bad, but I was thinking about what was interesting and what I thought was worth exploring and thinking about more more deeply.
EB: As you entered this tradition of criticism, did you see any sort of classifications amongst different kinds of writers? Did you see Joan as a writer who was more generous versus someone else who was more likely to criticize a dancer or a work?
MH: It’s like any kind of discipline. Everybody develops their own voice and their own color of their writing. You become familiar with different people’s style and approach, and sometimes you really admire somebody’s writing, but you can’t necessarily emulate it. It won’t make sense. It’s not you. A good example is Arlene Croce. Her writing for The New Yorker was so incredibly knowledgeable. The confidence with which she wrote was beyond, even when she was wrong, she had the most incredible confidence and she convinced you through the writing that she was right.
EB: She tended to be incredibly harsh, no?
MH: Not necessarily. She was also incredibly positive in other reviews. She was just quite mean. Somebody just told me that Lincoln Kirstein used to say she was like God because she saw everything. Like the rest of us, she was often wrong. But, she could harness incredible evidence to support her thesis. And in a way, I mean, reviews are, and I want to ask you about this too, reviews are a kind of argumentation. You’re trying to somehow convince the reader that what you’ve seen is what is to be seen in that particular work of art. Do you feel like when you do reviews or when you write about art, there is an element of argumentation?
EB: This reminds me of a conversation we had a bit ago that I think about a lot. You introduced the notion that all critics figure out their values, their artistic values, and what matters most to them, which becomes the critic’s focus. For some people, that might be descriptions of technique, or the mood of the piece, or the ideas of space. I think I tend to be drawn towards the ideas of a piece, what an artist is trying to communicate or respond to intellectually. In the Croce reading I’ve encountered, she seemed quite interested in reflecting what she perceived the choreographer was doing. In her response to Goldberg Variations by Jerome Robbins, for instance, she seems to be critiquing Robbins for trying to employ more academic ideas in this ballet.
MH: She could be incredibly negative. There’s a famous review, well, it wasn’t even a review because she hadn’t seen the piece, about Bill T. Jones’ piece was about death and dying. She famously wrote the piece as a protest against seeing the piece. She refused to see it and made an argument of what she called victim art, art that’s manipulative. She refused to be manipulated. So that is a very radical, you could perhaps call it stupid, or provocative stance to take. The piece pretty much destroyed her career, and Bill T. Jones won that argument, as he should have. It was a stupid thing to argue but there was a provocation there about what she thought about what the values of art is: should art be used as a platform to talk about and bring attention to and hope for empathy for the people involved in the creation of that work of art? That’s an interesting subject. If she hadn’t been so negative about it, it would have been an interesting subject of conversation.
EB: Reading that review now, it’s almost kind of funny, because it distills into sort of a generational clash.
MH: It turns out she was pretty right wing, so she just didn’t approve of the piece. It didn’t pass her smell test. She didn’t think art should do that. That’s not what she thought it was for. We all have our values, both negative and positive, but I try to think of my artistic values not in opposition to something. That seems less constructive to me.
EB: What has become important to you in viewing and how has that changed over the years?
MH: I think back to your earlier point about each critic having their own entry point. For me, my entry point for dance is music. That was the thing that first thrilled me, the way that movement and movement ideas, phrasing, choreography, and larger structures interact with music. That’s not just in ballet. There are other forms of dance where that is incredibly important as well. I’m often drawn especially to those forms of dance, like flamenco, for example, where essentially the two elements are in direct conversation. In fact, the dancer and the musician are often facing each other and responding to each other very directly. In Indian classical dance, the way the body moves is an illustration of and response to the music. Often there is vocal music, an extra layer of sound, as well. I’m really interested in these dynamics. I am also really interested in freedom on stage. It’s really something that I really respond to and write about and am interested in exploring, is how dancers are not just illustrating something, but how they are embodying and transcending the set narrative. How they are bringing themselves and their experience and drawing outside of the lines, which is why I love dancers who are not just precise, but who are also interesting. Dancers where I can see their minds working. These are just two of many values I uphold in dance. Another one, which is something negative, is that I don’t love choreography that depends on men manipulating women’s bodies a lot for dramatic value.
EB: In the context of partnering?
MH: In the context of partnering, yeah. I think that’s one thing that ballet has developed to a huge extent, but without thinking about what that kind of physical manipulation is saying. People ignore the subtext of that manipulation and use it as a way to impress or show flexibility or something like that.
What are your artistic values? Can you name one?
EB: Just one?
MH: Can you start with one?
EB: Well, I wonder because I studied ballet for so many years and I know what things are supposed to look like.
MH: I think this is a point of disagreement between us
EB: Yes Marina and I often disagree! In the best of ways! This may sound contradictory, that because I know how a step is carried out, that I don’t necessarily need a dancer to perform it in the most technically accurate way, the way a step is meant to look. I actually think my background has freed up my ability to observe. I am similar to you, in that I’m more interested in approach and interpretation than perfection. I actually think perfection can be quite boring. There are certain dancers we talk about who are maybe timid in attempting interpretation because they’re focused on looking a certain way. A big thing for me is I often become quite infuriated if I can’t distinguish a dance or deduce what’s particular about their approach. When they’re dancing the steps, but it doesn’t read in any particular way. I find it infuriating, because so much about watching dance is finding those particularities. If I can’t find them, I get annoyed.
MH: But also, because you study ballet, you pay more attention than I do to things like a dancer’s feet. In a way I don’t care that much about a dancer having a perfect feet.
EB: But you notice turnout more than I do.
MG: I do notice. I just assume people have turnout. It’s one of those things you can’t unsee. When someone shows you something, it shows you a dancer. It’s like, Look they’re so turned in! Once you see that you can never unsee it. And it translates to every other dancer as well. You just look for their turnout.
EB: There are few photos I’ve seen of dancers in leaps and more often than not, their front leg is completely turned in. So, I don’t know. People should be working harder on their turnout.
What does your profession of dance writing look like today? What does your portfolio of writing look like?
MH: You’re the next chapter of this with CULTUREBOT. You know what has been, what has to happen now, and what is happening in cultural criticism. When I was working at The New Yorker, and Joan was the dance critic there, there were dance critics who had jobs at newspapers and magazines. And so there was a vague notion that if you stayed in the business long enough, maybe one day that would be you. But I think I am the first generation who discovered very quickly that that was not going to be the case, because all those jobs just quickly disappeared. So I, like all other dance writers, am a freelancer. I write for different publications, and I do different things for each of these publications. I’ve had to learn to be nimble and develop different voices for those different publications.
For The Times, I do Features, Q and A’s, and profiles. For those pieces, I channel a newspaper style mindset. They’re usually 1500 words or fewer, so I have to be direct and succinct. Then, for The Hudson Review, I have this space for longform pieces, which are reviews that are around 3500 words about more than a singular piece. For these pieces, I get to reflect about different types of dance, or different dances within the same choreographer’s repertoire, or however I want to put them together. But it’s all about associations: reflections between one piece of work and another, or what a season felt like. I also post on social media, which I really, I quite like because I can go to a performance and then have an immediate, very kind of spontaneous reaction to what I’ve seen, like what you started our chat quoting. It’s simply a response like This is what I saw without having to really do research. In this day and age, that’s just what you have to do, and these approaches inform each other. One thing is not divorced from another. The short reviews are also the first draft for the longer reviews. They’re my first impression, and they go into the soup that ends up in a longer piece. Or when I wrote about a new Martha Graham biography [for The New York Review of Books], I read all the previously published Martha Graham biographies. It was incredibly interesting to dig into many, many different sources about one subject. It makes it richer. I also wrote a biography and I spent years researching, spending time in the studio, watching ballets by this person. That was also yet another much deeper arc in considering someone’s career and artistic choices and character. So it all feeds. They all feed each other.
EB: And you write a Substack?
MH: I eventually put everything on my Substack because it seems useful to have a singular location for all my work.
EB: And with Instagram, those captions have almost replaced what would have been 1000 word reviews after the fact?
MH: Right, because now I save the bigger ideas for The Hudson Review.
EB: When you were writing 1000 word reviews for publications, and being edited, what was the experience like? I mean, what was it like to be edited on a piece entirely based on your impressions?
MH: Editing can be really useful and it can be difficult. It depends on your relationship with the editor and their priorities and your priorities, but I learned a lot from writing 1000 word reviews. I taught myself about my taste by writing those reviews. When I started out, I would stay up till like four in the morning. Often, you know, just to get my thoughts on paper. And that was amazing training.
EB: You must have also learned the art of recording while watching?
MH: Yes, I take copious notes. Do you take notes?
EB: Yes, but what’s the content of your notes? I often just write down descriptions that sort of remind me of a thought about something that’s happened, or the name of a step or a color of a costume. Whatever helps to render an impression.
MH: When I watch dance, I have a stream of consciousness going on in my head. I think that’s why I write about dance, because I don’t have that when I go to the opera or when I hear a symphony. There’s something uniquely stimulating for me about going to see dance, and so my notes in the dark are a mixture of words that came to me because of what I was looking at at that moment, or a note about the music, or like you said, the color of a costume or sequence or a series of steps. Some critics have amazing memories, like Alistair Macaulay, the longtime critic at The Times. He has this recall, which is just phenomenal. He can describe a sequence of steps that he saw 30 years ago. And I have the opposite kind of memory, which is, I remember the end. I remember more than the end, but it’s hard to reconstruct everything that happened between the beginning and the end. But with my notes, I find that I can completely recall the experience. I can go back and relive what I saw moment by moment, especially if I listen to the music as well. For those of us who are not as gifted in the memory department, I think notes are really, really helpful.
EB: How did you come to take interest in other forms of dance?
MH: Just one last thought from the last question is that actually what matters most are the details. It’s not just an overarching feeling you had. It’s that detail, and those details are the things that make one performance more interesting than another performance, or one dance more interesting than another dance. It’s always these particular things, that one thing, and you and you can so easily forget that one thing unless you write it down.
How did I get interested in other forms of dance? I just started to see everything when I started getting interested in dance. I started writing and I volunteered to write for the “Goings On” section about town at The New Yorker. I think they needed someone, and that gave me an entry to a huge cross section of what was going on at the time. This was when the “Goings On” section about dance was a whole page, so we had to see an enormous amount of dance. So I saw everything. I saw modern dance, I saw downtown dance, I saw flamenco, I saw, you know, everything that I could. So that was an education right there. And then I also audited some classes at Columbia, taught by Lynn Garafola. That was a second education. I felt like I needed some chops. So, both of those opportunities opened up my world.
EB: How do you choose what you want to focus on for your feature pieces? Do you seem them as part of a larger project?
MH: There are several of us who write features for The Times, and we all have things that interest us. Brian Siebert wrote a huge book about tap. Siobhan Burke is really interested in downtown dance. We all have certain areas that we’re drawn to. But at the same time, I write about a lot of different things. I was recently in Denmark, and so I wrote a piece about Bournonville. I really am interested in the work of Jodi Melnek. I wrote about the piece she did about a Clarice Le Spector book. I thought that was an interesting combination and I wanted to write about it. So it’s really about something that sparks. I never pitch a story that is something that I’m not really interested in. There’s such little space anyway, so you might as well write about the things that you’re really interested in. My last piece for The Times was about Georgian dance, because I love dance traditions with interesting histories that don’t get enough space.
EB: That seemed quite fun to watch. I remember reading a piece that you wrote in The Nation in 2008 about Jerome Robbins. It was specifically about Dances at a Gathering, which is one of his most famous ballets. It’s an hour long ballet to Chopin. I was amazed by the last sentence where you recount the experience of walking out of the theater and onto the plaza of Lincoln Center. It felt so unlike your work now.
MH: Oh!
EB: In an enchanting and interesting way. I think you’re one of the critics I know who is more cautious about including yourself in the work. What are your thoughts on the role of self and criticism?
MH: Hmm, it’s interesting because my biography of Ratmansky has a lot of me in it, because the experience of writing it and doing the research was in itself, so interesting and felt relevant to telling the story. I’m not averse to sparingly mentioning your relationship to that piece of you know, of music or choreography, if it seems relevant. I don’t know. How do you feel about first person?
EB: I’m quite in favor. I enjoy using the acknowledgement of the self viewing because, I think it goes back to values, and I’m interested in thinking about why something impressed upon me in a certain way.
MH: I think one positive thing about using the first person is that you are acknowledging the fact that it is a subjective experience, and that’s something that I actually think is important. I do believe very strongly in my taste, but I know that it’s subjective. Both things are true at the same time. I also think using the first person is also an admission of a certain amount of vulnerability. You are affected by art, right? It’s not a cold, distant thing. When something moves you or creates an atmosphere, that’s a real experience of art. So it’s worth noting. I think.
EB: Not even that long ago, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, the George Balanchine Trust, which is the organization that exists to uphold the legacy of Balanchine’s work, didn’t allow any footage of Balanchine’s ballets on the internet. I remember being in high school and finding bootleg footage and bookmarking it and hoping they wouldn’t take it down.
MH: We’re all like pirates. All dance lovers are pirates. Like any bit of footage you find, you download immediately.
EB: The videos would always have these weird titles so no one would guess what it was. They’d be something like “The ballet to Gershwin music from XYZ year.” But, this is no longer the case!
The Trust must have changed their rules because City Ballet has become quite robust in their social media presence, and most recently I saw they have a new video series called “Favorite Phase,” where they have dancers demonstrate their favorite movement form a particular ballet and then City Ballet collaborates with the dancer’s personal instagram when they publish it.
I hate discussions of how social media changed things. I find it rather facile, but New York City Ballet is an interesting example, because their social media strategy seems to be so dancer-focused.
MH: City Ballet is a little different, because they curate their own social media very strenuously, and they put out beautiful videos. ABT maybe doesn’t publish that much material but they encourage their dancers to post things. I think it’s good for the dancers and it’s good for the company. The audience is able to develop a relationship with this or that dancer, which may encourage them to go see a performance when a particular dancer is performing. The dancers now also put out their own videos, and none of that was true before. I think it’s given the dancers agency. They’re now all professionals, not just of dancing but also of marketing and their own artistic output. There are negative aspects as well, of course. It disfavors dancers who aren’t interested in this kind of promotion. It doesn’t mean they’re not as talented as those who are interested in it. I recently interviewed Isabella Boylston, principal dancer at ABT, who told me that she makes more money off of her Instagram account than she does as a dancer. That really puts things in perspective. Both that dancer salaries are low, and that the potential for making money on these things, if you curate it well, is enormous. And of course, they do it. I mean, why would they not do it? They have short careers. They don’t make that much money. And yet, even Isabella acknowledged this, it takes up a lot of time and creative energy to be constantly coming up with new content.
EB: Do you think this dancer-focus approach has changed the viewing experience of the corps? Are they less a connected uint and more these many individual agents?
MH: I think it’s changed the viewing experience in the sense that people seek out particular dancers.
EB: How do you think, stylistically, City Ballet has changed over the years?
MH: Oh, wow. Just a small question. It has changed. It has always been in a state of change, even during when Balanchine was alive. In the time that I’ve watched the company, I’ve seen the big transition between Peter Martin’s and the post Peter Martin’s years. I’ve also seen the transition between the company I was seeing when I first started to really intensively look at ballet, which was really the work of Balanchine and Robbins, to a company with a lot of new choreography being made. What came first, Justin Peck or Ratmansky? I think it was Ratmansky. There was this feeling that there is a new voice that is not Balanchine or Robbins. It’s very different, but it’s interesting, and it’s individual. There was a feeling that something new was happening. Then I think after that it was that Justin Peck started to make ballets. And so there was like City Ballet going along and there was still these amazing original ballets like Concerto Barocco, but now there was actually some new stuff to look forward to. That has been a big change. There’s excitement about every season. And it’s not just Peck and Ratmansky, it’s that a few anchor talents brings out talent everywhere, because people are inspired and move in a different direction. It makes the whole field more fertile.
EB: Last question! Do you ever feel you can turn your critical eye off?
MH: No.
EB: Okay. Actual last question. Is there a particular moving performance that you remember?
MH: Oh gosh, I mean, there’s so many. Maybe a Wendy Whalen or Alina Cojocaru? There was a two day period where Alina Cojocaru and Natalia Osipova both danced Giselle back to back. You couldn’t believe how powerful both of them were and how different they were from each other. But even more recently, I saw Swan Lake with Catherine Hurlin one day and Chloe Misseldine the next day. These two dancers were so extraordinary, so inward and so in control of the material, and so alive on stage. It was the same thing, but the performances were vastly different. I simply felt lucky to be there.
EB: Though Catherine is quite outward.
MH: Yes she’s the opposite.
PHOTO BY JG DBRAY
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