ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Alastair Macaulay is one of the most influential dance critics of all time—or, as some would say, the greatest of all time (a title he himself disputes, though I wholeheartedly maintain that he is the singular GOAT). His career spans more than four decades across the UK, Europe, and the United States. A Cambridge graduate, he began writing about the performing arts in the late 1970s and quickly became a defining voice in dance criticism.
He has written for The New Yorker, The Guardian, Financial Times, and Times Literary Supplement, and served as Chief Dance Critic of The New York Times from 2007 to 2018—a tenure that made him one of the most widely read cultural critics in the world. He has lectured at Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, NYU, Juilliard, and Oxford, and contributed to leading arts publications across the globe.
Macaulay’s work spans essays on Petipa, Ashton, and Balanchine, in-depth interviews, and major historical analyses, including books on Margot Fonteyn and Matthew Bourne. He is currently Critic in Residence for Slipped Disc and preparing a major critical biography of Merce Cunningham. Across his career, Macaulay has shaped conversations about ballet, modern dance, theater, music, and criticism itself, bringing his deep knowledge, wit, and distinctive perspective to generations of readers, students, and artists.
He is one of my personal dance-writing heroes, and I couldn’t be more delighted to have had this conversation—doubly so to be able to share it with you.
The full podcast conversation is above, with lightly edited excerpts below & for more information here is his website.
Cynthia: How did you get started as a critic?
Alastair:Well, by accident really. I never meant to be a critic, surprisingly, because I now realize I had been training myself in a way, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I knew people who were educated to become critics, but we didn’t talk about that. I just came to London and already had a fondness, at age 21, for dance and music—opera in particular—and theater.
That year, 1976, I got the dance bug and began writing letters, and that was the crucial thing. When I wrote letters about opera, I was probably writing to clever musical friends who knew much more than I did, which meant my letters were probably insufferable, trying to keep up with their level. But when I wrote to perfectly intelligent people about dance, none of us knew much about it. We were just undergraduates trying to share our pleasure, and I was seeing much more dance than anybody else, so I was the one describing the many performances I was seeing after I moved to London.
I’d begun this while I was still an undergraduate. I was reading Classics at Clare College, Cambridge, and one of the women I wrote to—another undergraduate—when I arrived on my last term, she said, “Alastair, I loved your letter about ballet at Covent Garden. I read it aloud to my mother, and we both think you should be a dance critic.”
I was 20, and I apologize to anyone who’s heard me say this before, but I just laughed and laughed. It was as if someone had said, “You should be a male model.” In one sense it was a terrific compliment, but I also thought nobody serious does that for a living.
I went on writing letters obsessively. For almost two years, more and more friends said, “You’ve got to do this for a living,” and for more than a year I didn’t take them remotely seriously. But eventually, when I was 22 and working in bookshops in London, I began to realize that I was obsessed and should commit to the performing arts in one way or another. I wasn’t sure whether criticism was the thing.
To cut the story short, I got a break as a critic in the beginning of May 1978, when I was still 22. The woman who was giving up her job because she had to remain in America called me—very glamorously, I think, from Heathrow—and said, “My dear, you are a dance critic, and you’ve got five days to file your first column.”
It was for a fashion and gossip newspaper called Ritz that came out once a month. You had to make your subjects entertaining, put all names in capital letters, and make it fun, which was very good training in journalism. I wanted to show these fashionable, gossipy readers that I was serious about dance, but I wasn’t above gossip and I wasn’t above fashion.
Cynthia: That comes through in your writing years later. I always read your column in The New York Times, and even when the review was scathing, you always made me want to see the dance. There was room left for curiosity—I always thought to myself, I wonder if I would feel that way too. It was entertaining, snarky, witty, but backed up by love of the art form. The door was still open even if you didn’t like it.
Alastair:That’s good. I’m really glad if that came across. Thank you.
Cynthia: Which critics or mentors shaped your understanding of how to write about dance?
Alastair:I probably began unconsciously by steeping myself in music criticism. I learned so much about opera when I was 18, 19, 20. I used to sit in Cambridge Public Library, go through back issues of The Gramophone, read Opera magazine, and newspapers too.
I had kind of forgotten about that, but I was reading very eminent critics: Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Philip Hope-Wallace, and above all Andrew Porter. I was reading Porter’s British reviews from the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, even after he had moved to New York to become the great music critic of The New Yorker.
I only realized the influence of all that toward the end of my time in New York, when readers would say, “I don’t know anything about dance, and I don’t care terribly about it. You’re the only dance critic I read, for the pleasure of your voice. It reminds me of British music critics.” I thought, oh, something must have rubbed off, even if I didn’t know what I’d learned.
When I became a dance critic, there was a magazine published by the Friends of Covent Garden called About the House. In spring 1974 it published several pages of reviews written by Clive Barnes for The New York Times about the Royal Ballet season at the Met. Suddenly here were these intoxicating reviews by Clive, who later became not a close friend, but a friend. That made a strong impression.
I remember writing to him about 30 years later to apologize, saying I thought I’d filched a point or a good quote without giving him full credit, and he was very gracious. His writing showed me it was worth spending time watching ballet. Friends wanted to go to the ballet when I still wanted to go to the opera, and gradually I got the dance bug.
Friends of mine wanted to go to the ballet when I was still wanting to go to the opera. I moved to London, and the best British newspaper critics were probably the ones I learned from in particular—three of them especially.
I would always try to read John Percival in The Times, Mary Clarke in The Guardian, and before—no, before Mary Clarke—James Kennedy Monaghan, who was a weird name, because he wrote under James Kennedy in The Guardian and under his proper surname, which was James Monaghan, in Dancing Times. I kept thinking, why do these two men keep agreeing with each other, and about everything? I didn’t know then that they were the same person.
And then Clement Crisp in the Financial Times. I was just 21 and I didn’t know anything, but I was learning as much as I could from all three of those critics.
Occasionally, when you are ignorant and new, you think these people know much more than you do. For example, I hated Glen Tetley’s Voluntaries the moment I saw it. To me it was terribly unmusical, and all of them raved about it. So I thought, oh, I must be wrong, and I went on seeing Voluntaries and trying to see what was good about it.
It was only later, when I read Arlene Croce, that I realized it was perfectly fine to dislike the choreography of Glen Tetley to that music.
Then there was Clement, who really was a wonderful critic for sixty years at the Financial Times. Phenomenal. Very witty and very erudite. And it was fun disagreeing, even with Clement, because he just got deeper into the art. He gave you more things to think about. That was a lesson in itself.
Then I began to read Edwin Denby, and then I began to read Arlene Croce. I knew about her a little, but I wasn’t reading The New Yorker yet. About a day after I became a critic, I was introduced to Mary Clarke, who was editing Dancing Times and was just taking over The Guardian review from James Kennedy Monaghan.
She wrote to me saying, “Do you read Arlene Croce in The New Yorker? Her first collection, After Images, is just out—recommended reading for an elderly 22-year-old dance critic,” referring to something I had written in one of my early columns. It was just lovely that this woman had taken me seriously enough to make the recommendation.
I ordered a press copy of After Images, which I still find more thrilling and more broadening than any other collection of Arlene Croce’s writings. Arlene—who just died last December, a year ago—was the biggest influence on me, other than the dead Edwin Denby, whom we all revered.
Cynthia: It’s interesting to note how you feel when you realize that prestigious critics felt differently about a performance than you did. I think this comes up with dance a lot: people are afraid to trust themselves and their own viewpoint on a performance. You hear opinions repeated, and then the opinion itself takes on a life of its own.
Alastair: I’m sure that goes on with all critics, and I’m sure there are people who espouse my point of view simply because they think, “Oh my God, Alastair Macaulay thinks this,” and wouldn’t dare disagree.
Believe me, Arlene Croce was a terrifying person to disagree with, especially in later years. She was fine at first, but later she became more and more entrenched in her point of view. And maybe I’m the same as we get older—that’s what we are.
It takes courage to think, “I like that review by that critic, but it’s not my opinion.” You have to know your own mind pretty well. I think it’s part of growing up. We probably all begin by espousing other people’s points of view.
Cynthia: Do you remember the first review that you wrote that really felt like your authentic voice?
Alastair: This just goes on and on and on. I mean, sometimes in some moods, I would discard everything I wrote for the first ten years, and I really learned. I thought I knew how to write a sentence. I thought I knew how to write a paragraph, and that some aspects of writing I was, let’s say, adequate at. And then after ten years, I worked on The New Yorker, and the editing there was the kind I had never encountered before.
That experience really taught me to write much more precisely, to use a far more varied vocabulary—so many things. It taught me not to take second best—my own second best—as a solution, but to keep rethinking. And it’s a lifelong process, of course. From those ten years—even though some of my writing was very immature—I learned a lot. You also learn from disagreeing, as we’ve already begun to establish.
In 1979 I made my first visit to New York, where there was a competition for young critics in Ballet Review, which existed for about forty years. I decided I was just at the right stage to enter, and I wrote a review of a ballet that I knew was very un-New York, by Frederick Ashton: The Two Pigeons.
I wrote a whole essay about it. I traveled around England looking at performances of The Two Pigeons and trained myself to describe the choreography more thoroughly than I had yet known how to describe anything. I think it is very immature now, but I wrote with a kind of lyrical enthusiasm. That was probably a new kind of breakthrough on my part. It was something where my voice began to emerge.
Later that year, New York City Ballet—which I had seen in New York—came to Covent Garden. I was so angry at the way most British critics wrote stupidly and insensitively about Balanchine. To me, he was wonderful. I loved Frederick Ashton so much, but he and Balanchine were the same age. It was obvious that you should write with the same esteem for both these masters, who were both seventy-five that year. It was astonishing how many British critics wrote with some degree of condescension about Balanchine.
It actually changed my politics. I remember thinking it was shocking that we had to write Mr. Balanchine, Sir Frederick Ashton, and it made me question the British class system—that we should use honorifics that way. I’ve tried ever since never to use them if I can avoid it.
So I wrote an essay for Dancing Times, just letting fly—really letting my voice emerge with a sense of the epiphany I had found watching those ballets and those dancers. I think it should look to anybody who reads it now like the work of a twenty-four-year-old. It was the work of a twenty-four-year-old, but it was a breakthrough for me.
Cynthia: Within the dance world, in the classical styles of training—particularly the Vaganova style—the people trained that way are very condescending and dismissive of the technique and training of all the Balanchine companies. And you’ll see a little of that vice versa: Balanchine dancers will criticize the Russians for their absence of musicality, or for holding poses too long, et cetera. But it’s interesting to hear that there was that kind of dismissiveness from the classical school, even among the writers at that time. I wouldn’t have guessed that.
Alastair: I was lucky because of the critics I knew. I began to know Clement Crisp, for example, who urged me to travel, and I already wanted to. I was so thunderstruck by the writing of Arlene Croce and Edwin Denby that I traveled to New York in January 1979, while I was only twenty-three. I had no money. It was before I’d met most London critics, and I spent three weeks there. I probably only met two New York critics of any importance: Tobi Tobias and David Vaughan. David Vaughan had a huge influence on me.
But really, what I was learning was that I should travel and start looking at dance in different places. You feel differently about the Royal Danes, whom I saw that year, if you go to Copenhagen—you feel it in the context of the architecture, the society of Copenhagen. You start to understand the Royal Ballet London better when you’ve traveled. Once you see it, when you come back to your home city, you certainly feel differently about New York City Ballet when you see it appearing in your home theater or at Covent Garden, having already seen it at a New York State Theater and Lincoln Center. All of those experiences helped my mind to develop.
In 1984, I managed to get to Russia, which was still very much the Soviet Union, to see both the Kirov and the Bolshoi. I didn’t see much of the Bolshoi, but I saw both companies, and all of that was a great education. Your love for all these examples—my hope is there—is because you have a curious mind.
Some experiences were very hard. Looking at New York City Ballet at first was challenging, because it was so unlike what I was used to. I took one look at Suzanne Farrell or Meryl Ashley and I began to surrender to them at once. Then I had to analyze why and what it was that was thrilling, even though it was unlike anyone I had ever seen in London. I was just young enough to do that. I wasn’t stuck in a rut.
I think that openness goes on. As soon as I say it, I feel I should bash myself for sounding complacent, because the truth is I’ve never fully surrendered to the Paris Opera Ballet, to put it kindly. Even though I was thunderstruck the first time I saw the Kirov Ballet in 1982, and again in 1987, many of the reviews I wrote of the Kirov Mariinsky seem to reflect various serious problems I’ve had with them.
What I find fascinating about the Kirov—and I don’t mean today, but certainly up to, say, 2010, 2014, maybe later—is that someone at the Kirov, and maybe the Bolshoi, reads foreign reviews very seriously. The next time you watch that company, it won’t necessarily be better, but they would have attended to that particular problem. I thought, “Oh my God. I think somebody’s been reading my review.” That’s true—they’ve often developed a different kind of problem.
Cynthia: It’s like they’re really taking the correction.
Alastair: But they really are. Whereas you could be moaning about the Royal Ballet or New York City Ballet, and they wouldn’t make, you know, any change at all.
Cynthia: It’s interesting to think about the companies looking different within their own locations. That the art form itself is not just part of the architecture, literally, but the architecture of the society. So then, out of context, it means something else, which is, of course, an issue with archival art forms like ballet in general. In a lot of ways, we’re always seeing it out of context unless it’s a new work, and even those, a lot of the times, are derivative.
Cynthia: Who were the key dancers who influenced your early taste?
Alastair: I’m probably not going to remember any of the most important ones now. Margot Fonteyn, of course, was your ideal. She was in the air; as you grew up, there were books and photographs of Margot Fonteyn. I saw her, I suppose, at the end of her career in ten roles, and I realized she had this legendary musicality.
I probably never saw the musicality at its greatest because I was not seeing her in tutu roles any longer, you know? But God, she existed within and around the music with such clarity, beauty, and complexity. But the two ballerinas who perhaps I saw much more—maybe three, who I’m adding quickly—are Meryl Park.
Meryl Park was probably not the most wonderful in terms of line. I didn’t analyze what was wrong with her line at the time. She had a terrific theater presence, she was a very intelligent artist, and she had the most astonishing musicality. It was the kind of musicality where you could feel her playing with a phrase in the way that one hears Violette Verdi did.
Antoinette Sibley put it to me once. She said, “There are two kinds of musicality. When I dance, when Margot or Monica dances,” she said, “we are the music. But there’s another kind of musicality, and that is what Meryl has and what Violette has—they can play with the music.” And she said, “I wish I was like that.” Meryl was like that.
I don’t think, I dunno, that you could see it at all in any films, but believe me, when you were there live—up to about the time of her fortieth birthday, or a little later, when injury began to change the dancing—it was extraordinary.
But the two ballerinas from whom I probably learned most were Natalia Makarova and Lynn Seymour.
Makarova had the perfect body, very beautiful, highly intelligent dancer. What drove me into shock with Makarova was in the world of which she was most famous, which was Swan Lake. She—and I don’t think any film shows this, but now they’ve all been edited—went after the music in a way I had never known.
I mean, she would follow it a whole bar or two bars later; particularly, she would end two bars later. So if you saw her do Swan Lake, she would always end Odette’s variation seconds after the music could stop. I had never known what seemed to me un-musicality like that. And quite a lot of critics enthused about it. I just went into shock. Why aren’t people clamoring about this?
Then there was Lynn Seymour. Her body was full of arches, lines, and curves in the most extraordinary way, all of which were intensely expressive. I’ve never known a ballerina—and I’m never a dancer—capable of that kind of intensity of expression.
And it came from the center of her being. I was so lucky with Lynn Seymour that I saw her in great roles made for her by Frederick Ashton, and above all, Kenneth MacMillan—which I don’t mean “above all,” I knew above all Frederick Ashton—but he only made three roles on her. I did see her twenty times in A Month in the Country, and I’m very glad I saw all of those twenty performances.
Cynthia: Are there dancers today that you find as exciting?
Alastair: Well, I certainly find some dancers very exciting. I should also have added Anthony Dowell, who probably was the man I wanted to be, had I been a dancer, you know? And then it was so good for me to have him coming to the Royal. He just seemed to surrender himself to so many aspects of Royal Ballet styles.
Having seen those, then—I mean, how lucky I am to have lived to see David Hallberg. Perhaps not what he dances today, but his first years at ABT, and Herman Cornejo—those were two miraculous male dancers. I’m thrilled that I had the chance to write about Sara Mearns in the years in which she came to so many of her great roles at New York City Ballet. How amazing it was to have seen Natalia Osipova when she first emerged. I haven’t quite seen her in recent years, but to see her between her ABT debut in 2009—I think I’d seen her a little bit with the Bolshoi before then—up to about 2015, when she became a member of the Royal Ballet, performing a lot of different roles, was thrilling.
I just remember thinking, well, here I am in 2015, I was sixty years old. I had seen in the late seventies a period when, within a couple of months, I had seen the Giselles of Natalia Makarova, Gelsey Kirkland, Eva Evdokimova—who, for some people, was the greatest Giselle, by the way—often overlooked now. Margaret Barbieri, who many British people adore, Galina Samsova, who gave the most astonishing mad scene, among other things, I ever saw.
All of these were greats, and they happened to me when I was 22, 23—not 21, 22 actually. But here I was in 2012, 2013, looking at Natalia Osipova, Diana Vishneva, and Alina Cojocaru. To watch those three, often on the same weekend during Giselle with ABT, I thought, this is an astonishing thing. These three really are showing me the younger generation, the span of what Giselle can be between them—just as much as those dancers years ago.
You know, I’ve lived through a golden period.
Cynthia: You’ve written about a lot of different styles: classical, modern. Did you have a preference in the beginning?
Alastair: Ballet was really what I knew. It was what was available to me. And frankly, I had no money when I first came to London, so it was cheaper to sit in the cheap seats of Covent Garden than it was to go to Sadler’s Wells to see modern companies or whatever. And I certainly did see the Martha Graham Company in 1976.
Then, in 1979, when the company came back, I saw them lots of times. I began, as soon as I became a critic, I don’t think I’d particularly had any bias between ballet and modern. I just had to see some really great modern work to realize it was as great as ballet. I was aware that Merce Cunningham was taken very seriously by people before I saw his company. I went to Edinburgh in 1979, and my first reaction was, “What’s the problem?” I was just in love with what I was looking at. Then I heard the music, and I realized how strange the music could be.
I think it really was love at first sight with Cunningham, and then a few question marks later on.
Cynthia: As with all great love affairs.
Alastair: Nicely put.
I think I always loved Fred Astaire. There are so many different kinds of dancing. There are always new things to see, and then gradually I began looking at various national forms of dancing.
I forget when I first really began to look at flamenco. Probably about 1980. There was a good company run by Mario Maya, very connected to the political, angry side of flamenco, and that was thrilling. And then Indian dance—I think I began looking at it seriously, probably not at very great examples in the late ’80s. But then I did start to go, maybe at the beginning of the century. There was a wonderful weekend at the Edinburgh Festival in London. We didn’t get the great exposure to Indian dance that New York had, at least when I was at the New York Times. And I was lucky that I had coincided with a great period of Indian dance at the New York Times.
That became a very deep fascination for me. I went twice to India for four weeks, partly because I was middle-aged and wanted to look at temples, and I took the opportunity to see as much Indian dance as I could. And I’m sure I’m extremely ignorant to this day. But I realized I was writing about Indian dance in a way that Indian critics weren’t. I think that helped me, and maybe helped some people in Indian dance.
The general convention in Indian dance was that you looked, and the dancer or choreographer was trying to express and convey, and then you commented on whether they were succeeding or not. I just thought, “Never mind this. I’m not qualified there, but let’s just describe what is going on.” They are using Kathak or Odissi, or whatever, in this way. And I tried to analyze it—very good for the mind—when you were in your fifties and sixties.
Cynthia: Is there a choreographer or maybe a dancer that you wish more people knew about today?
Alastair: Well, it’s sad to me that my home choreographer—Frederick Ashton—is not better known, and that there are more great examples of what was wonderful about Ashton’s style.
I truly mean it when I say that. I think Ashton, much of the time, was as musical as Balanchine, or more musical than Balanchine. And that’s against the law to say now. But I mean it. Whereas, of course, I think Balanchine was actually a greater dramatist, which nobody takes seriously at all—or at least he was a more radical dramatist.
When I began to watch both of their versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I thought Ashton tells the story even better than Balanchine, but Balanchine tells a better story. Once I got into that, I began to realize that was true of all Balanchine’s story ballets. Prodigal Son is a great story—he really tells it so amazingly. Ashton wouldn’t have had the guts to go for the radical sexuality of The Siren, or the humiliation of the final scene.
I mean, in London, I just wish we saw more of Pam Tanowitz, but at least we see Pam Tanowitz, and I very much wish London saw much more Alexei Ratmansky. We have Wayne McGregor in London, and we had Liam Scarlett. I can go on. Basically, London’s choreographers at present, to me, are a disappointing choice and a bad choice on the whole.
The first British choreographer I took very seriously when I was discovering British modern dance was Richard Alston. He began by being a Cunninghamite and working without music. Then he began to use music, and I realized he was acutely musical. Trying to analyze musicality—I think—is about the hardest thing in criticism.
Cynthia: It’s interesting how even the musicality can be cultural. Because in Russia, the ballerina is the queen of the world, and the conductor is expected to follow her. I saw one time a performance with Lopatkina doing Giselle, and it was almost like an argument between her and the conductor. She was truly on her own time, and he was just refusing to respond to her. I thought, wow, that’s fascinating. That would never happen at New York City Ballet. They’d be fired.
Alastair: There was a legend that Svetlana Beriosova had to stop dancing Giselle after Act One for months. So Lynn Seymour leapt into the breach for Act Two and managed to find the point of coming close to the orchestra pit, bourrée-ing, and saying over her shoulder to the conductor, “Too f*****g slow, Ashley,” to the conductor. But I’m sure she was on the music while she said it.
Cynthia: If someone were just beginning their journey as a dance audience member, where do you think they should begin?
Alastair: If you’re just beginning and you think you’re taking it seriously, just look at what you have at home and analyze it—but then quickly, just travel. Look around at what you can. You can’t these days go to Russia, which is something I would always have recommended. I think I was about twenty-eight when I first went to Russia.
I would go to Copenhagen. I think at the moment I would encourage people to go to Amsterdam. When I came to the New York Times, I was already aware there was a lot of important ballet, in particular from outside New York. I’d looked at the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, I’d looked at the San Francisco Ballet. Over the years, I looked at Pacific Northwest Ballet. So I thought, there is so much going on around America, and I should shake up New York by reminding them that New York did not contain all that’s great about American ballet.
It’s still on my conscience that I never traveled to Dayton, Ohio, to look at the Dayton Contemporary Dance Theater, which, when I saw it in Washington, had some of the most fabulous dancing I’ve seen. There were great forms of hip hop. Of course, I wrote a lot about Jookin in the Memphis form—Lil Buck is the famous one—but going to Memphis to see whole battles was electrifying. Then going to Detroit to look at their form of hip hop, which is called jit.
I wish I had gone and spent time in Chicago and San Francisco to look at their local forms. I just never had the time. I think you can see, particularly with something like hip hop, that by looking at a local folk form, you learn so much about this country and its local dialect. It was curious for me to be often the whitest and most European and the oldest person in the audience looking at these things.
It made me laugh when I was watching one Memphis Jookin event. I think I was, whether I was fifty-nine or sixty-one, so much the whitest person in the room, so much the oldest person in the room, and I was having a great time.
Cynthia: You answered fifty of my questions in one—about the myriad of styles and different countries: Indian classical dancing, flamenco, hip hop, ballet.
Alastair: I just think, you know, one of the reasons I came from New York was to grow, to extend myself.
I was giving up quite a lot by coming because I had loved—and over the years had become, above all, a theater critic—and I was having such a good time reviewing the final plays of Pinter and almost the final plays of Tom Stoppard, and so many other great British playwrights, and looking at so much Shakespeare. I had very, very mixed feelings about giving that up to take the New York Times job. I nearly didn’t take it.
So I just thought, if I’m going to come, I really have to feel I’m going on an adventure to new things in my mind and new things in the world. I went back to London quite often and would think I had made the wrong choice. I should have stayed in London, because London theater is yet better than New York dance. Then I eventually shrugged and thought, well, right. It was a mistake, but it was a very interesting mistake—the most interesting mistake of my life: writing about dance in America.
Cynthia: And you know, I feel like so much of the time our lives become about our most interesting mistakes.
Alastair: I hope, I hope.
Cynthia: There’s a lot of discussion that criticism is dead, that there aren’t any negative reviews because it’s all tied in with commercialism. What do you think? What do you feel is the critic’s responsibility to artists, to audiences, and to the art form itself?
Alastair: That’s a really nice question, a good one. And it probably is true that there aren’t enough negative reviews. People have been saying that for a long time, but it’s getting more intense. I do remember that the New York Times, particularly under the long regime of Anna Kisselgoff, you had to decode her reviews to know what was really negative under the apparent surface of praise.
I had imagined that was the style of the New York Times when I was considering the job. Finally, after three months of dangling it in front of my nose without giving me an offer, they offered me the job and said, “You’re going to have the weekend to think about it. Ask us any questions you want during the weekend.” I think I only wrote one question, because I happened to be ill. I was honestly in bed for the weekend.
When I came through from my fever, I remember sending an email to my future arts editor at the New York Times, whom I came to adore. I just simply asked him the question: if I were to take the job, do you have any clue how many negative reviews I would write, or how severe they would be? Because I had imagined the New York scene was much worse.
Sam wrote straight back and said, “That’s what I want from all of my critics. I don’t want any soft-soaping.” I thought, oh, that’s not the way I thought the New York Times expected. So I thought, I can work for a man like Sam. Within my first month, I did see work I just did not like at all, and I thought, I’ve got a choice: I’d either be gentle about the choreographer’s work, who is unknown to me, or I can blast it out of the water.
I deliberately thought, I’m going to test my readership and test the New York Times by blasting it out of the water. I probably would never write quite so severely again, but I really went for it, because I really wanted to see whether the readers, and in part my editors, would support me throughout all of that. Thank God—they laughed. I remember editors coming up to me and just saying, “Why don’t you say what you really think?” They were with me, and they weren’t saying I was going too far.
Cynthia: Did it affect the readership? I would imagine that people became more interested in dance during your tenure. I know I did, and I was already obsessed to begin with.
Alastair: Who can say? I’m sure I lost readers because people weren’t used to that kind of anger or opinionated quality. I hope—I think I did gain readers at the New York Times. I can’t do the sums between those two. I love the readers I had, and I should say that the readers were the main reason I took the job. I loved working at the Financial Times in the nineties, but suddenly, around the year 2000, I remember feeling that the demographics had changed, and then I only really heard from interested parties after that.
I did hear from them when I was often quoted outside theaters and on publicity, but I wasn’t hearing from the general reader, whatever that is, at the moment. I remember the New York Times got in touch in late 2006 to consider offering me the job. I remember thinking they were never going to offer it to me because they’d have to bring me across the Atlantic, and nobody spends that kind of money anymore.
Then, after a week, the man I knew at the New York Times, who had worked with me—Evan, a New Yorker, Chip McGrath—called me and said, “We just want you to know that you are way at the top of the list of everybody we are considering at the New York Times.” That was a surprise straight away.
This was probably the beginning of November 2006. They wanted to know whether I was seriously interested in the job, or if I just couldn’t get a pay rise at the Financial Times. I laughed straight away and said, “Well, I would like a pay rise at the Financial Times.” Since they weren’t mentioning money, I didn’t know what this was about. I said, “I can tell you what would interest me: coming to the New York Times, and that is the readers. My impression is that if I wrote for the New York Times, I would hear from the general reader. I’ve stopped hearing from what I consider the general reader at the Financial Times.”
I remember Chip laughed. He said, “Oh boy, we have readers.” I said, “I’m always grateful for them, but we certainly have one.” And it was absolutely true.
Cynthia: You also had writers writing under you that you commissioned during your time.
Alastair: It’s a very important thing to have an editor taking you as a young writer where you haven’t been before. I didn’t see it much as my responsibility to comment. Most of what they wrote, if they wrote well, I wrote them emails just to say, “Bravo, brava.” But I couldn’t do that every time. I think it was very important for them not to be writing to gain my approval, otherwise that could be very infantilizing. I hope I showed all of them that I did approve of some of their work, that I wasn’t there judging the whole time, and they shouldn’t hang around waiting for me to say the right thing.
Cynthia: Looking back at your career, what do you hope your writing contributed to dance?
Alastair: I think I’m very proud that I covered hip hop and flamenco, as well as ballet and modern dance. I’m very proud that I’ve covered a lot of music and theater, as well as modern dance, and I’m very proud that I’ve held two—or three—top jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. That’s unusual. I’m pleased with that.
When I was moving to the New York Times, I became conscious, especially when I realized I got a thousand words’ power on you, that I should start writing more about music and musicality than anybody had done before. I hope that aspect of my work will stand up.
It was very strange—the power of the New York Times, because it’s actually not always the powerful newspaper you think it is. I could tell you about things I wrote on a Wednesday paper, and you’d go back to see it on Friday, and the audience was not there, so to speak. You didn’t automatically command people to see what you were raving about. But I suppose gradually, bit by bit, I realized I did have some effect. Certainly, the ballet audience read me. I probably did have a big effect on the Merce Cunningham audience. I hope I had the effect on the Mark Morris audience, because he is given to such genius and such awfulness, depending on the show, but truly genius when it works. Those are some of the things—I could go on, couldn’t I?
Cynthia: What advice would you give to emerging critics who would like to build a voice within the current times?
Alastair: Building a voice—it’s such a complicated thing. Well, make sure it’s your voice, and that it’s not just your newspaper’s voice. And while occasionally you find the right critic for the right newspaper, I never felt I was, and that’s fine. Just think you’re swimming against the grain. Use it.
My first newspaper reviews of ballet were for The Guardian. I imagine that everybody around the arts page at The Guardian tended to be pro-modern arts or pro-postmodern or whatever. So I was trying to show why you could take ballet seriously to those readers.
And I probably wrote a lot of modern dance reviews too when I was at the Financial Times, which I was for many years. I never felt I had a financial bone in my body, so I never, and I felt it was generally read by the establishment, and I think I did learn quite quickly that people who read the Financial Times could afford anything you recommended, which I wasn’t used to. So it was a shock to realize I was writing for a different kind of class, shall we say, financially.
But with the New York Times, it was so extraordinarily diverse, and I think I was getting my voice because while I knew that the New York Times was a big deal in the eyes of Americans and the world, I did not know how big a deal. Within a year I remember saying particularly to Claudia La Rocco, you know, when you write for the New York Times, it feels as if half your readers are blaming you for what’s wrong with the world, and half of your readers assume you are the fount of all truth and beauty and wisdom. And of course neither is true.
Cynthia: Is there something you’d hope to see moving forward in the realms of dance writing and particularly education?
Alastair: I just hope people will read the great work of Edwin Denby, Arlene Croce, Joan Acocella, others of my contemporaries, and build on what we achieved. You know, we didn’t do it lightly and we didn’t do it easily.
I hope my reviews seemed fluent and entertaining, but very few of them were written in a hurry. They didn’t just drop off a log, you know. It would be too simple to say that there is a tradition of dance criticism, because, for example, Clive Barnes and Arlene Croce were on the whole at loggerheads and writing in very different ways, but one could learn from both of them. I think I did learn to some degree from Clive and to a very large degree from Arlene. Likewise from Clement and other British critics, you know, just learn what you can and gradually, as you do, you learn your voice.
Cynthia: Dance is really a fringe subject. The amount of people who are, who have a depth of knowledge of its history and its artists over the years, are so few.
Alastair: Well, one of the great joys of the New York Times job was realizing I could ask questions of lots of people. I think I was always aware, as a young critic, that too many critics kept their cards too close to their chest. I thought quite often, we are given special information by press officers or whoever, fellow colleagues—why not share? Share the wisdom wherever you can. Be the student, not just the expert.
Cynthia: Alastair, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for all of your work, all of your writing, all of your passion. You have been an inspiration for me since you started at the New York Times. I’m sure it would’ve been before that, but I just hadn’t been introduced to your work. I used to live on the Upper East Side, and I had a membership to the Met Museum. Every week I would take the paper, go to the Met, sit in the sculpture area, pretend it was my living room, and read your reviews.
Alastair: That’s—well, that’s a huge compliment. Thank you very much.
November 17th 2025. I had the great pleasure and luck to meet Alastair Macaulay in person at New York City Center. Where he was moderating a panel on Dutch National Ballet and the work of Hans van Manen as part of City Center’s Studio 5 Series.
Here is the selfie I asked him to take with me. I posted it on instagram letting everyone know that I met the GOAT dance critic (GOAT stands for Greatest Of All Time) and hence began our argument on who should claim the title.
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