I think that an era ended yesterday, November 19, 2008, with the death of Clive Barnes, perhaps the last and certainly the most active of the pioneering dance critics and internationally reprinted theater critics whose always forceful opinions and wise reflections influenced 20th century performing arts. His influence perhaps reached its peak from 1965 to 1978 as both the chief dance and theater critic of the New York Times.
But Clive both enjoyed and was intimidated by that influence. His conflicting desires to maintain artistic standards but fear of closing a show with harsh criticism sometimes led him to almost nonsensical contradictions. Still, no one approached the performing arts with more enthusiasm. Refusing to retire, in his 81st year, Clive Barnes, until this month worked as the lead dance, theater, and opera critic of the New York Post, and continued as the chief critic for major publications in England and Italy.
At one time or another, Clive wrote for most prestigious journals covering the arts: he became the first full-time dance critic of the Times of London and is said to have single-handedly raised the significance of dance and dance criticism in the English-speaking world. For decades he also edited leading dance and theater and music journals in England while living in the United States and appearing on television, teaching college courses, guest-lecturing everywhere, and publishing books and recordings on the arts.
I once kidded him that a really enthusiastic kindergarten teacher could get him to talk about the arts in her class between all his other engagements. On one occasion, he stopped to say hello, then said he had to rush off after the matinee we were seeing in New York because he was seeing three other performances that evening.
Having seen more performances than most educators, critics or performers in the arts, Clive became a kind of guru. But he was modest about it. At a meeting of dance critics during an international ballet competition, Clive gave a talk on American dance and remarked that he didn't know that much about the early American dancer/choreographer Catherine Littlefield. My dear friend Ann Barzel (1905-2007), Chicago dance critic who was then about 85, growled, "Ask me!" Clive made a courtly gesture and said, "I don't pretend to know what you do about American dance, Ann."
When the New York Times decided to keep him as dance critic but find another chief theater critic, Clive moved to the New York Post in 1978, keeping both positions and earning what was said to be the highest salary of any critic anywhere. He told me that Rupert Murdoch wanted to gamble that Clive could raise the cultural level of the Post's readership and thus gain a more upscale list of advertisers but that only the first aim had been achieved.
I first enjoyed his generous friendship when Clive was on the Times, and I subsequently became friendly with his second wife, "Trish," a dance aficionado and mother of his son and daughter. At that time, Clive's handsome son Christopher was a brilliant teenager, madly enthusiastic about screwball-comedy films of the 1930s. Two wives later, Clive had become a rather frail, elderly man, but he still attended and wrote and lectured about more performances than anyone I knew.
Everyone knew about Clive Barnes, but not everyone knew how facile and fast a writer he was. The appealingly reflective essays he wrote for Dance Magazine for the past few decades, titled with a dance-jargon pun, "Attitudes," may have gotten him to proofread and revise, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I remember seeing Clive when the Panovs were finally let out of the Soviet Union and came from Israel to the United States. They gave their premiere performance in the West in Philadelphia. At the exuberant finale, Clive jumped up to get to a phone and dictate his review. I didn't have to write until after the weekend; my afternoon newspaper wouldn't come out until Monday afternoon. So I sat through perhaps twenty minutes of curtain calls and slow emptying of the hall, and went backstage to find a friend who had an invitation for me to the reception in the same building. About forty minutes afterwards Mike Kriegsman came in, having phoned in his review to the Washington Post. Clive was there when I arrived. I will never know how he could remember by paragraph four what he had dictated for paragraph one; but his reviews are archived, and they are coherent, clever, perceptive and clearly detailed. "Yes, I do write fast," Clive Barnes admitted to me. He was incredibly good at it.
