The Reviews Are In
Afew weeks ago, in Hanover, Germany, dance
critic Wiebke Huber found herself face to face with an angry choreographer. It seems that Huber had just that morning published a scathing review of the choreographer’s latest work. And the choreographer, Marco Goecke, showed up to settle the score.
It doesn’t sound like much of a confrontation, does it? The phrase “angry choreographer” is a pair of words that you don’t see together very often, and it’s hard to imagine just how dangerous an angry choreographer might be. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? A nasty remark, followed by snap, snap, turn, dip, high kick, jazz hands? Or maybe the choreographer would dance menacingly around the critic, fusing classical flamenco moves — stamping feet, castanets — with airborne ballet moves until the dance critic apologized, perhaps in a dance of her own?
What happened was this: Goecke was so incensed by the review that he confronted Huber during an intermission at a ballet performance in the Hanover opera house. After exchanging some angry words, Goecke reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic sack filled with excrement he had collected from his pet dachshund, Gustav, and smeared it on the dance critic’s face.
So be forewarned: If you make a choreographer angry, you may need to carry around some wet wipes for a while. Just in case.
Honestly, anyone who has ever gotten a bad review knows the feeling. You work hard on a project, and it can be anything these days in the age of Yelp and online review sites. And there’s always a Wiebke Huber around to denigrate and nitpick. You’re not supposed to take these things personally, of course, but how was Goecke supposed to feel when he opened up the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and saw that Huber had written that the audience members of Goecke’s recent dance production, In the Dutch Mountains, felt like they were “going insane?” And worse, like they were being “killed by boredom?”
Can we really blame him for choosing the Gustav Option when faced with that very personal, very unconstructive criticism?
While I’ve been mostly lucky in my career as a television writer and author in the review department, I can still feel the sting of every less-than-rave review. There are, apparently, a few misguided people around who did not find my first book, Conversations with My Agent, the delightful and memorable read that it is. It’s nothing too painful to read, actually — even my worst critics seem to have enjoyed the book — but it’s still a little weird to come across on a random Google search. OK, OK, not that random. What I Googled were these keywords: “Rob Long Conversations with My Agent did not like did not enjoy bad unfunny book untalented.”
It’s the short, casual bad reviews that pack the bitterest punch. Those sting more than any proper, published review I received. It feels like you’ve just discovered that sometimes, when you’re not around, your friends talk trash about you.
It’s tempting to think that the rarified world of the German dance community is far removed from our own lives, but it’s not so. In the past two months, I’ve been asked to partake in dozens of customer service surveys, rating everyone from the guy who delivered my pad thai to the anesthesiologist at my colonoscopy — for the record, Would Use Again and Would Recommend to Others — and I’ve also been aware, whenever I take an Uber, that the driver is rating me, too. Modern businesses subject their employees to regular performance reviews, where I guess the trick is not to cry or argue or act out, and some even offer something called a “360 Degree Review,” in which all employees are reviewed by their supervisors and their direct reports.
It doesn’t matter what business or enterprise you’re in. Sometimes you’re the Dance Critic and sometimes you’re the Angry Choreographer. And sometimes, I guess, you’re Gustav, wondering what they’re going to do with that plastic bag.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.