Welcome back, touche! Nice to see you again. I've been away too, including doing lots of travelling to see dance and meet dance people on both coasts.
touche wrote:
How could they receive a standing ovation at a huge black tie affair full of highly intelligent scholarly individuals; then a torturously bad review from a "possible GED high school drop out".
LOL! For our non-US readers, GED stands for "General Educational Development" and is perhaps equivalent to the "O-Levels" in the Commonwealth system.
Actually, I've seen more than my fair share of bad performances receiving standing ovations. In fact, look no further than LA. There is a topic somewhere that every performance in LA seems to get a standing ovation, even by people who should know better. Andre?
touche wrote:
My original point remains the same...reviewers need to be artistically and educationally qualified. The audience does not.
It would definitely help to know what they're talking about but it depends on the publication and who it serves. For example, I would be bored to death to read a travel article written by a geography professor. Or an article on the weather written by a physicist. Similarly, I tune out most dance reviews containing too many ballet terms.
The best-ever selling travel book was "A Year in Provence," written by Peter Mayle. He was an ad executive.
touche wrote:
Funny that the audience that night was the most animated I have ever seen in my history of going to dance performances. Talking and talking with eyes fully open and hands waving and pointing. How could that possibly get a poor review that was so shallow. It could not if it had been done by a thinking individual who was trained to look deeper.
I have to respectfully disagree. The night I went to was not as animated as that. Friday night audiences are typically more animated (younger professionals) than weekend audiences (families and older patrons) but for some reason in the SF East Bay, the reverse is true. Nonetheless, the point is that on the night of the review, it wasn't as exciting. So it is very conceivable that the reviewer was not shallow but perhaps more in-sync with that night's audience (especially since another writer who wrote a more positive review also agreed with many points in the Chron review, as I recall. The other reviewer just happened to pick different points to write about).