Clive Barnes, who as a critic in Britain and later for The New York Times
helped bring dance to a broad audience with an exuberant, highly personal style
in his reviews, died early this morning. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
His death, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, was caused by complications of
cancer, his wife, Valerie Taylor Barnes, said. Until a few weeks before his
death, he had been writing reviews for The New York Post, as he had for the last
30 years.
Mr. Barnes, an energetic Londoner who once described himself as “your typical
working-class overachiever,” made his mark by waging a sustained assault on
British dance criticism as it was then practiced just after World War II. It
was, he argued, provincial and ill-informed scribbling usually written by music
critics. Writing for several publications simultaneously, chief among them The
Spectator and The Times of London, which hired him as its first full-time dance
critic in 1961, he exposed his readers to foreign dance companies and
choreographers, like George
Balanchine and Martha Graham, that most British critics had dismissed.
His 13 years as dance critic at The Times, from 1965 to 1977 — for a time he
was also its theater critic — coincided with a rapid expansion of the dance
world and an explosion of new talent. He witnessed and described, as he later
observed in Dance magazine, “dance’s finest hours in all its brief history,” a
period in which Jerome
Robbins and Balanchine were at their peak, Merce
Cunningham and Paul
Taylor moved from strength to strength, and new choreographers like Eliot
Feld and Twyla
Tharp were beginning to make a stir.
At The Times, Mr. Barnes made dance an art for all, taking both dance
criticism and American dance out of its specialized niche. His erudition,
distilled into shrewdly pithy analysis, prompted not just readers, but
choreographers and dancers, to sit up and learn something new.
“He was literate, knowledgeable and passionate,” said Lynn Garafola, a
professor of dance at Barnard
College. “When it came to a challenging work, he would review not just the
first performance, but the second performance and third performance, and then
write an analytic piece too. He also had a remarkable visual memory. He wasn’t
just seeing the ballet in front of him. He had a bank of memories that went back
half a century.”
Clive Alexander Barnes was born in London. His father, an ambulance driver,
deserted the family when Clive was seven. His mother, a secretary for a
theatrical press agent, passed along complimentary tickets to her son, who began
attending theater and ballet at an early age.
After attending a boarding school on scholarship, he enrolled at the
University of London’s medical school. It did not work out. “He wanted to be a
psychiatrist, but that was 10 years away, and he couldn’t stand the sight of
blood,” his second wife, the former Patricia Winckley, told Dance magazine.
After spending two years with the Royal Air Force, he earned a scholarship to
Oxford, where he joined the Ballet Club and became an editor of Arabesque, its
quarterly journal. He also began writing for the journal Dance and Dancers,
eventually becoming its executive editor.
He and a coterie of like-minded dance writers mounted a kind of cultural
takeover bid, taking deliberate aim at the dance establishment and pushing
themselves forward as the voices of the rising generation. “We all began
freelancing, and we were all terribly mean to the established dance critics, who
were all music critics, really, and didn’t know a thing about dance,” Mr. Barnes
told McCall’s magazine in 1969. “We were kind of young Turks, obnoxious as hell,
but it worked. We wanted every paper in London to have a specialist dance
critic, and we won. Now they all do.”
Mr. Barnes began writing on dance for The New Statesman and published his
first book, “Ballet in Britain Since the War,” in 1953. In 1956, after toiling
as a planner for the London County Council for several years, he was hired by
The Daily Express, a tabloid newspaper, to review dance, theater, film and
television. With his left hand, he turned out dance criticism for several other
newspapers under pseudonyms.
An early marriage ended in divorce, as did subsequent marriages to Ms.
Winckley and Amy Pagnozzi. In addition to his fourth wife, Valerie Taylor
Barnes, he is survived by a son, Christopher, of London; a daughter, Maya
Johansen, of Woodstock, N.Y., and two grandchildren. In 1965 editors at The New
York Times, which was reorganizing its cultural news coverage, asked Mr. Barnes,
who had been contributing reviews from London for several years, to become the
newspaper’s drama critic. Although undecided, Mr. Barnes jumped at the offer of
a free airplane ticket to New York, where Balanchine’s “Don Quixote” was about
to receive its premiere. Once in New York, he decided to stay.
As a critic he stood out for open-mindedness and enthusiasm. Dance was
traditionally divided into audiences attached to a single choreographer; Mr.
Barnes could champion Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham at the same time.
He was one of the first to point out, in 1966, that Mr. Cunningham, then
leaving audiences dumbfounded, was not interested in specific meaning but rather
was an artist "who brings something to our attention to make of it just what we
will."
"We have to meet the artist halfway, we have to bring something before we can
take something away," Mr. Barnes wrote.
He excelled at pithy, perceptive description. The masculine style of Paul
Taylor’s company, which he supported, he called a "teddy-bear athleticism."
As for ballet, Mr. Barnes extended its reach away from its usual fans to a
mass audience. Rudolf
Nureyev might have attracted balletomanes from the start, but somebody had
to spread the word. Frederick
Ashton, the great English choreographer, was Mr. Barnes’s hero.
But Mr. Barnes was also an early supporter of George Balanchine and paid
tribute to him in a typically distilled insight when the New
York City Ballet opened its 1972 Stravinsky Festival. "Many choreographers
have borrowed Stravinsky,” he wrote, “but Mr. Balanchine has continually
returned interest on the loan."
He could be scathing. He once called the Bolshoi "Swan Lake" "a national
catastrophe.” Of Kenneth MacMillan’s "Romeo and Juliet," he wrote, "Often the
choreography pads where it should exult."
Yet, unafraid of extravagant prose, he also noted that at the end of a
performance of that ballet, with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in the
principal roles, "it is the image of Dame Margot and Mr. Nureyev that remains,
like the blood-red shape of an instant left on a sunlit-retina when the eyes are
closed."
Few present would have argued with that image and even fewer would have
conceived it.
 
In 1967, after The New York Herald Tribune and several other newspapers
ceased publication, editors at The Times, concerned that too much power was now
concentrated in one critic, divided the job. Walter Kerr, the daily critic, was
assigned to write weekly critical essays in the Sunday arts section, and Mr.
Barnes was offered the vacant slot, which he initially refused. “I felt that I
was a first-rate dance critic and did not want to be a second-rate drama
critic,” he told Newsweek at the time.
Once on the job, he went at it with gusto. He showed a marked taste for
experimental and unconventional fare, and seemed more in his element with Harold
Pinter or Jerzy Grotowski than standard Broadway fare. The criticism was
punchy, chatty and quirky, with a witty turn of phrase that some found
delightful, others infuriating.
In “The Season,” his chronicle of the 1967-68 Broadway season, William
Goldman complained that Mr. Barnes was biased toward British playwrights and
actors and, unforgivably, had failed to recognize Tennessee
Williams and Arthur
Miller as modern masters. The combustible producer David
Merrick vowed to stay on Broadway if only “for the pleasure of throwing his
fat Limey posterior out in the street.”
In 1978, editors at The Times decided that one critic could not,
realistically, cover two beats, and Mr. Barnes was ordered to give up the
theater job. He accepted a dual-critic position with The New York Post, and
there he remained for the next 30 years, writing reviews until just a few weeks
before his death. He also wrote the “Attitudes” column for Dance Magazine from
1989, and contributed to the French magazine Ballet 2000 and the British
magazine The Stage.
He wrote or contributed to many books, among them “Frederick Ashton and His
Ballets” (1961) “Dance Scene U.S.A.” (1967) and “Nureyev” (1982).
Prolific and influential, he nonetheless maintained a consistently skeptical
attitude toward criticism in general and his own in particular. “The job’s
impossible,” he once said, “and one must pray that one will be only moderately
incompetent.”