Editing Artists

I had planned to respond to PAJ’s prompt for this issue by writing about my intimate year with incomparable women artists in their eighties. But then someone sent me “The Art of Editing No. 1,” a 1994 interview with Robert Gottlieb and a collection of famous writers he edited, talking about their writer-editor relationship. This redirected me, and I began thinking about my glancing blows with critics over the years. Not blows as in, I knocked out critics who wrote mean things (wouldn’t every artist reading this want to read that story!). But rather, glancing blows as in my brushes with conversion, and Bonnie Marranca’s role in my development as an artist-critic.I first met Robert Gottlieb in the elevator at the Baryshnikov Arts Center sometime in the later aughts. We had just seen something, either William Forsythe’s performance installation, a grieving love letter to his wife, or a piece by Tere O’Connor, viewed in the round. Probably the latter. I had not liked the piece very much—it looked too modern-dancey to me. I believe Gottlieb admired the performance, though I could be misremembering. He introduced himself as we descended: “I’m Bob Gottlieb.” I’m Emily Coates, I said. He told me he remembered my dancing at New York City Ballet and asked why I had left. I blurted out that I thought Peter Martins was a terrible leader and the place was a mess and at a certain point I realized that I could lead the company better than he could. I left to go looking for something else more artistically fulfilling. Gottlieb replied, “You should write about that. We’ll publish it in Ballet Review.” I did not know then how closely he had been involved with NYCB over the years.As we spoke, we walked east along 37th Street toward 9th Avenue in the darkness, passing over the short steel bridge and the midtown desert of Hell’s Kitchen, graffiti on the walkway rails. I ran into Mikhail Baryshnikov on that same bridge after I started teaching at Yale. I had been dancing with his White Oak Dance Project when I temporarily quit the dance world for college. “Hello, Professor,” Misha said to me. Which I took as double-edged—in the way only Misha could deliver what might be flattery or a dig, preying on your insecurities. Mine was that I was always seen as too brainy in the dance world. I was told I was too quiet, not extroverted enough, off in a corner, overthinking. The main reason I fled to the university was to find the space to question, dialogue, speak, and be heard. Many years later I realized Misha might have been cheekily referring to a Chekhov character. Chekhov had no love for academics. Gottlieb’s invitation flattered me. I had not published anything at that point, but I was an aspiring writer, and the possibility that getting a piece into a publication like Ballet Review could be as easy as his invitation felt startling. Yet I never took him up on the offer. I was not ready to say what I thought in public.Not much later, a publicist read some small thing I wrote, declared that I was a good writer, and offered to connect me to Alastair Macaulay, then head dance critic of the New York Times. “You absolutely cannot let it slip to the usual roster of dance writers that I have done this,” she said. She was doing me a favor for having completely blown a job we had hired her to do. She connected me to Alastair by email and he invited me to see a performance with him, a small ballet company presented in a studio on the fifth floor of City Center. I found the choreography appallingly trite. Much to my mystification, Alastair later posted a glowing review about the choreographer’s musicality. He and I talked for a bit after we left, walking along 56th Street. I had sent him a short piece that I had written in a seminar as an English major at Yale—a silly portrait of another student which began: “Burt Helm is a funny guy. At age 22, he is a humorist, cultural critic, comedy sketch writer, reporter, budding physicist, classical cellist, actor, radio DJ, self-identified ’type-II’ skier and underage drunk, part-time con man, and pick-up artist.”No one in that class knew I was thirty years old, on hiatus from my full-time professional dance career. I looked young and went incognito. I called up Burt’s mother and father, close friends, and high school guidance counselors, who provided droll quotes that I collaged into a profile. “You can, as they say, write,” Alastair told me. He told me he needed to prioritize pitches from his regular roster of writers, but if I had story ideas, I was welcome to send them to him. I never took him up on that offer. Though I did prepare a pitch, several years later, to write about my trip to Nairobi to work with a Kenyan dancer and choreographer named Opiyo Okach. I never sent that pitch because I never made it to Nairobi. But I think the main problem was that I could not make the necessary internal switch from performer to journalist and critic. It felt like crossing enemy lines.I did, however, start to get to know a slew of critics. As a student at Yale, I took a writing course with William Deresiewicz, who had written dance reviews for the Wall Street Journal before becoming an academic and later slammed the Ivy league (and his students) in his book Excellent Sheep for miseducating generations to be conformist careerists. He reached out to Joan Acocella on my behalf, who responded to say she would be happy to speak to me on the phone: “I always admired her as a dancer. Lots of guts. Defiant presence.”In other encounters, I went undercover. That same year I interviewed the art critic Arthur Danto, for a piece I wrote in a journalism class about the critical hype around John Currin. Danto was kind and generous and talked me through his review of Currin’s work. He assumed I was twenty years old and wished me the very best post-graduation. The New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman ignored my email requests for an interview, which pissed off my professor, the journalist Steven Brill, who gave me an A- for that, and for not getting an interview with John Currin himself. Currin’s gallery had passed me off to a lowly assistant who strategically ghosted me, making me feel very ambivalent about wearing the journalism hat. I was an artist, not a bloodthirsty investigative reporter. I did not like the ways that my queries, even for a student assignment, supercharged people’s responses. Representing someone in print could be damaging, they knew. The power of writing was new to me.I met Brian Seibert on an AC-less Metro North train to New Haven in June 2012. I remember the year because I was on my way to my sister’s fortieth birthday in Boston. He leaned over my seat and said, “Are you Emily Coates?” and for some reason I thought he was from the Yale School of Music. But no, he was a dance critic, who in fact had just reviewed a performance of Yvonne Rainer’s work that I appeared in at DiaBeacon: “the ballet-trained Ms. Coates, in her balances and leaps, exhibited no average-person effort. These were not flaws.” (Couldn’t he just have written “she was brilliantly virtuosic”?!) Those would be the last lines Brian would write about me because I hired him to teach at Yale and we became friends, which barred him from ever writing about me again. “You’ve got a lot of power,” I said to him on that train ride. He demurred: “Not that much.” Which blew my mind. Subsequently, when I go see performances with him, artists I know well get shaky and stutter in his presence. On that June day, as we pulled into the station, my hands were full, and Brian politely offered to carry the fancy pillow I had gotten as a gift for my sister at ABC Carpet and Home. It was through empathizing with a critic trying to figure out how to carry a velvet pillow that looked like a four-foot-long hotdog when I realized I might have mispurchased.These interactions humanized critics, who faced their own woes in an economy that disregarded dance. Those I spoke with expressed a commitment to telling the truth as they saw it—not to somehow rescue dance, but to testify: dance happened here. I, too, had started to watch more performances from the audience, and began to build my sensitivity to that half of the picture. The other half happened backstage, and though there were sympathies to be cultivated, mine ultimately lay with the more vulnerable side: I retained the DNA of the one on stage being looked at—the dancer, the maker, the subject. I couldn’t stay there solely, either.The one hundred and eleventh reason I bolted from the professional dance world of New York to go to college in my late twenties was because I did not want to sit around waiting for a critic to make me. I wanted to make myself. One of the ways I wanted to create myself was as a writer. Yet the only apparent available outlet for writers in the dance world was as a journalist and critic—meaning I would need to step across the invisible professional line and relinquish my identity as an artist.I could not cross that professional line because I was not done performing. The other thing happening in this period of my life was that I was transforming myself from a translator of other artists’ ideas into a creator: I began to make my own performances, often weaving together writing and movement. I wanted to play with performance as a medium for storytelling that could draw flexibly on poetry and theatre as much as on choreography. I was interested in writing and performance, co-creating each other.In a course on African American poets taught by Robert Stepto, I learned about The Crisis, the journal launched in 1910 by a collection of Black writers and edited by W.E.B. Dubois, and the imperative to write their voices into history. Writing is power, because in our logocentric culture, words control narratives. The Crisis urgently undid and remade Black history. Dance artists needed a platform to write themselves into history, too—the silent lot, subjected to criticism without discourse, waiting to be made, undone, or erased according to critical whimsy. I told an older arts patron about my idea for a journal. He was a lawyer who had become a successful novelist, edited by Bob Gottlieb, and said he’d ask Bob if I could call him. Bob said yes, so a number of years after our first encounter I called him up and told him my idea. “The most obvious question,” Gottlieb said, “is do dancers really have that much to say?” He did, however, agree to be on my board of directors, for a journal I never launched.Bonnie Marranca would never question whether dancers have that much to say. In 2009, PAJ reached out to me with an invitation to write about the simultaneous loss of two great choreographers in the same summer. I wrote “Beyond the Visible: The Legacies of Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch.” Later I wrote profiles on Souleymane Badolo and Sara Rudner, short round-up reviews of New York City performance seasons, and an essay on the poetics of physics in dance. Writing for PAJ, I did not have to resolve a crisis of identity that insisted I be on one side or another of the critical divide. I could write as myself—an artist with informed opinions about the work of others. More recently, Bonnie will say, “You haven’t even mentioned your own work.” So, I go back and write about my own performance creations, too. Permission to invent the form of the essay to suit me swinging around in perspective: performer, creator, critic, researcher—this is not to be taken for granted in a world that prioritizes writing short form punchy pitches easily digestible to an editor who might know nothing about dance.As we think about the future of performance criticism, I want to pay tribute to the space Bonnie has created as an editor for artists who write. In the ever-more paltry, under-resourced dance world, the critical terrain shrinks reactively like the Colorado River. There will be endless debates about the medium of writing into the twenty-first century: whether social media has democratized criticism, whether working critics can be appropriately diversified to reflect the actual spectrum of human experiences and points-of-view, whether the one full-time dance critic left standing in the United States can carry on her back the semblance of robust critical discourse or the public good of an entire art form. PAJ under Bonnie’s foundational leadership has been a hold out—eye toward posterity, capturing a nearly fifty-year slice of live performance, now history, written by artists.I still want to write about my uncanny year of working with and learning from amazing women artists in their eighties: Yvonne Rainer, Susan Howe, Joan Jonas, and Allegra Kent. I want to write about their uncompromising bravery, their poetics, their approach to aging, and how I imbibe their lessons to rejuvenate me through the next half of my life as a creator. The piece I published this past winter in PAJ 136 (“The Wings: Susan Howe and Emily Coates in Conversation”) was a start. I am not sure now where the next piece will find a home.Thank you, Bonnie, for your important work.