Claudia La Rocco's Journey to Dance Criticism

I wanted to share something I found on the NYTimes website. It is a narrative in which La Rocco describes how she became a dance critic.

Enjoy! (The original posting can be found here)



Claudia La Rocco is a dance critic for The Times.

People often ask me how I became a dance critic. There are several ways to answer this question, but the one I usually give goes something like this:

I was happily ensconced as a general arts writer for The Associated Press, churning out reviews and features on various artists and events, and dabbling in just about every genre, except dance. One day, my editor asked me what I knew about dance, and did I think I could write about it. A little, I answered, and sure, if she gave me several months to prepare.

She smiled, pityingly. Shortly thereafter I was informed that Mikhail Baryshnikov would be performing soon, and that I would be reviewing him.

Voila! A dance critic was born. Thus began several months of humiliating myself in international print and online (not to mention my agita). The evidence of my gross initial ineptitude is still out there, lurking, all too Google-able. Who knew that some of the most terrifying experiences of my young adult life would take place in a theater?

What I didn’t realize at the time, of course, is that dance criticism is an entirely impossible endeavor. That’s what makes it so much fun.

There is something wonderfully peculiar about the rush of reviewing live art, of translating a nonverbal, transitory form into the English language. How grand, and how strange, not to know what I think of something until I find myself writing the words I feel are best suited — but still so often inadequate — to explain what it was like to encounter another person’s world.
Sometimes that world seems so meager, or so ridiculous, that all I can really do is try to salvage the evening by having some fun (see my review of "Celtic Tiger," which did not endear me to Michael Flatley’s many fans). But most of the time, I am stymied only by my own inabilities (see this review, for example): it’s like trying to solve a puzzle when the edges of the pieces keep shifting. Frustrating, yes — but those edges are so interesting, so beautiful, that you can’t stop yourself from picking them up, again and again. Maybe this time, you think, they’ll fit.