Clive Barnes, Dance Critic, Dies at 81
November 19, 2008
Although I knew Clive Barnes for his monthly “Attitudes” column in Dance Magazine, he spent many years as a dance and drama critic for The NY Times and wrote for several British newspapers as well. Here’s an excerpt describing his time at Oxford, from William Grimes’ NY Times article about Mr. Barnes:
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.”
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[...] issue of Dance Magazine addresses the delicate and challenging work of a dance critic. Mr. Barnes, who died on November 19th at the age of 81, admits that he’s “developed a compassion for not only the criticized, but also for the [...]