The inconsistencies of the dance critic Clement Crisp

Clement Crisp (right) and Serge Lifar (left) at the seventieth birthday party for Arnold Haskell, 1973. Photograph: G.B.L.Wilson.

I was commissioned to write about Clement Crisp for the summer 2024 issue of Dance Research. This revised version of that essay is longer and less discreet. AM, 2024.vii.09

I.

For over sixty years, Clement Crisp (1926-2022) contributed dance criticism to the Financial Times. Throughout that long period - a span surely unequalled anywhere - his writing was illustrious, authoritative, erudite, hilarious, and quotably eloquent. This would have been enough, but Clement was also an author and co-author of many books on dance, a freelance writer of criticism and dance history for sundry publications, a lecturer, a librarian, a tutor, a matchless wit and humorist, and much more. He was an excellent cook and gardener, and also loved to entertain friends at his home. His conversation - on Racine, Haydn, English novelists from Dickens to A.S.Byatt, current television series, and contrasting fashion designs by Jean Muir and Laura Ashley - often dazzled. As a source of sheer fun, he was incomparable. In the intervals of dance performances, you often felt that, if you weren’t in his company, you were missing the evening’s best entertainment – which sometimes continued with his sotto voce remarks during the dancing. (At one Royal Ballet Sleeping Beauty matinee, the role of the prince was danced by one of Clement’s least favourite dancers. As that prince made his entrance, a child in the audience called out “Go away!” Clement said softly “That child’s a critic.”)

Peter Hollamby, Clement’s life partner for some fifty years or more, once singled out his phone conversations as the most hilarious of all. On one occasion in 1980, Clement called while I was lodging with my eldest sister. While she ran upstairs to see if I was at home, her baby son spoke into the receiver. When my sister picked up an extension to the ‘phone, she heard her son (my nephew Edward) saying “Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy”, to which Clement was replying, with hauteur, “Not to the best of my knowledge.”

Another time, after Clement and I had both been watching the Kirov Ballet in Paris in 1982, he once opened a ’phone conversation - in that immediately recognisable voice and accent - with the words: “Hello. My name is Zena Stan Evil Game. Who am I?” I replied “I don’t know who you are, Clement. Tell me.” His answer was “Galina Mezentseva, of course! It’s an anagram.”

Clement’s years at the Financial Times were 1956-2018. During all those decades, he remained a spiffing journalist and much-loved colleague. Not all critics are cherished by other writers and staff. After Clement’s death, however, a group of his FT arts colleagues - former arts editors, sub-editors and critics of art, theatre, and music - met to toast his memory; I was proud to be among them. We remembered how an FT writer, away from the Arts page, once made the blunder, while referring to “Britain’s best-known homosexual”, of naming him not as Quentin Crisp (as evidently intended) but as Clement Crisp. For a day or more, the phone was silent. Members of staff wondered if Clement might turn vengeful, hurt, embittered, or litigious. Then Clement proved clement indeed. He put his head round the door of the Arts editor’s office and said, with impish delicacy, “I had no idea I was so famous.”

I once called to ask him about an FT Christmas party I had missed. He told me that, at one point, while in conversation with the FT’s longterm television critic Chris Dunkley, he had said “Look at those three women looking at us over there! I think they’ve got one eye and one tooth and one ear between them and they pass them around.” Dunkley had replied “Thank you, but one of them’s my wife.” I shrieked, “Clement! What on earth did you say?” Clement replied, “I said ‘ Oh yes - and one of them’s mine’.”

To read him was to quote him. One fellow critic at the FT, Martin Hoyle, always singled out Clement’s review of a piece of performance art: “In this piece, Second Stride may be said to be ‘into’ world religion in the sense that a bull is ‘into’ a china shop.” I do not forget how, in his review of the first two casts of a dismally uninspired new-old Royal Ballet production of Giselle (1980), he wrote that the performances by Natalia Makarova and Anthony Dowell pierced through the staging “like a laser beam through fudge.” The choreographer Matthew Bourne, whose work received many negative reviews from Crisp, singled out one in which the dancers of Adventures in Motion Pictures resembled “the rugby team from Lesbos” and another (Highland Fling, 1994) in which Bourne’s Scottish sylphs in motion looked “like manic dirty laundry”. But which ballet by Glen Tetley was it that featured long passages of what Clement felt could only be called “coitus uninterruptus”?

Nobody made the mistake of thinking Clement a mere joker, though. He was exceptionally knowledgeable, well briefed, valuably insightful, gloriously stylish. When I was first educating my own interest in ballet at age twenty, years before I met him, his FT review of a Royal Ballet quadruple bill (George Balanchine’s Serenade, Hans van Manen’s Twilight, Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun, Kenneth MacMillan’s Elite Syncopations) drew attention to the four different types of dance musicality employed. This was just the kind of criticism to deepen my analytical thought about dance and choreography.

Over more than forty years, I was fortunate enough to observe him at close quarters in a wide spectrum of circumstances - with his co-author Mary Clarke (1923-2014); with his and my editorial and critical colleagues at the FT (for which I wrote in the years 1988-2007, and for which, in 2022, I wrote his obituary); with fellow critics of several disciplines in at least five countries; as a lecturer at both the Royal Academy of Dancing and the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance (as the Royal Academy of Dance and Trinity Laban were then named). I still quote bons mots he uttered and published; I have kept missives of various kinds from him dating between 1979 and 2020.

In 1980, he and I both filed simultaneous on-the-night reviews of a triple bill of Stravinsky ballets choreographed by Maurice Béjart (The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring). I was twenty-four; I hope my review (The Guardian) was adequate, but I truly have no memory of it. All I remember now is the breathtaking opening line of Clement’s notice: “Béjart and Stravinsky is one of those fabled partnerships, like Romeo and Goneril, or bacon and strawberries.”

Once, in the foyer at the Covent Garden opera house, I overheard him exclaim about Haydn: “So much better than that boring Mozart!” Six years passed before I had an occasion to ask him about this, but when I did, he at once confirmed that he had meant it. He then qualified it, with terrific panache: “Of course the three da Ponte operas and the last ten piano concerti are among the great works of the human spirit! But eventually, I think there’s a certain sentimentality at the core of Mozart - whereas at the core of Haydn there’s a certain toughness I adore.” Whether or not you disagree with him here, these was scintillating, challenging words that deepened critical thought. On another occasion, when he saw I was reading Bleak House, he announced “Greatest novel of the nineteenth century!” I wish now I had asked him to compare it to Balzac (whom Ivor Guest preferred), to Dostoyevsky, and to Tolstoy - but instead he proceeded to discuss perhaps the most controversial character in Bleak House, Esther Summerson, whose subtle and contradictory complexities he found utterly compelling.

His reviews abounded in this kind of wide range of reference beyond dance. He would compare one dance to chamber music by Fauré, another to the TV puppet character Edd the Duck. The cultural theorist Johan Huisinga had written in 1938 of “Homo ludens” and of the importance of play to society and culture; Crisp was the embodiment of homo ludens. His playfulness bubbled up through his whole persona.

He liked a certain formality, however. If you didn’t know him well, he liked you to call him Mr Crisp, not Clement. I refer to him here as Clement -  but unless you were personally known to him, you’d be false to his spirit if you took that liberty.

II.

There were mysteries about Clement’s life. For the last twenty years of his career, no question was more asked in the dance world than “How old is Clement Crisp?” He had often told me “Start lying about your age now, dear!” while I was still in my twenties, and in his later years he certainly encouraged people to think he was younger than he was. At least one arts editor of the FT understood him to say that Clement was not his given name, and that he had adopted it on arrival at Oxford. (In the London telephone book in the 1980s, his Islington address was given under “A.C.Crisp.”) At the time of his death, it emerged that he had been born in 1926. 

Like so many British dance devotees of his generation, Clement discovered ballet during the Second World War. He was in his teens; his parents took him to the gallery at the New Theatre, where the Vic-Wells Ballet was playing. He enjoyed recalling this memory of “ballet among the bombs with a bun”^[1] for the rest of his days. (The Clement of those years was very unlike the sophisticate of later years. His longterm friend Bill Poole once recalled how scared the young Clement had been to travel by Underground.) After the Second World War and a stint of National Service, he spent a year of study in Bordeaux. He remained fluently francophone all his life; he was a lasting devotee of both the Paris Opéra Ballet and of French cuisine.

He then became an undergraduate at Keble College, Oxford, specialising in French. (One of his teachers was Enid Starkie.) It remains remarkable that the Oxford University Ballet Club in his day contained no fewer than five future dance critics of major London newspapers: Clive Barnes (The Times and Daily Express, later transferring to the New York Times and subsequently the New York Post; Clement; Nicholas Dromgoole (The Sunday Telegraph); John Percival (The Times, and later The Independent; and Andrew Porter (the FT) - all five of whom died between 2008 and 2023. Thanks to such 1940s undergraduates, that Ballet Club was enterprising, energetic, and inquiring. Clement and the others did not remember Dromgoole as having been among their number at Oxford, but another undergraduate of those years, Michael Codron, later important as a London theatre producer, became another of Clement’s closest and lifelong friends.

It's often forgotten that Porter (1928-2014), who was soon on the way to becoming a music critic of uncommon distinction, also reviewed dance whenever his music duties allowed, from the 1950s till the early 1990s. But it was music that had brought Porter and Clement (who had trained in piano) together as friends. They met (so Clement told me after Porter’s death) at an Oxford University production of Mozart’s Idomeneo, when Crisp turned the pages as Porter played the keyboard continuo.

Barnes commissioned reviews for the club’s magazine. (In 2008, he told me wryly that he had rejected the first review Clement ever wrote. It was, according to Barnes, an over-the-top paean to one Parisian ballerina, fancily gushy without acknowledging her shortcomings.) To me, Clement himself never mentioned any undergraduate reviews.

Clement proved thoroughly self-contradictory about his first professional work as a critic. On innumerable occasions from 1979 onward, he told me that nobody should begin dance criticism until they had built up twenty years’ experience of observing the art form. Since he knew perfectly well that Mary Clarke had begun as a critic at age twenty, and that I had begun at twenty-two, he was being deliberately provocative here, implying that we - unlike himself - had begun too young - but I assumed that he was at least being sincere about his own experience; and that, after his first view of ballet in the Second World War, he himself had not begun to review dance until the early 1960s. But I was wrong. In 2003, he declared that he had now reached his fiftieth anniversary as a critic (he claimed that he had forgotten the name of the ephemeral publication that issued this first professional piece), and therefore that he had begun reviewing in 1953. Therefore all those proclamations about twenty years’ prior experience had been twaddle.

(But Clement made quite a number of unsubstantiated claims. From the 1990s on, he liked to claim - in print - that he had seen every Giselle of note since the Second World War. Oh yes? When David Vaughan asked me to ask Clement if he had seen Tatiana Riabouchinska dance Giselle - an interpretation that impressed Vaughan but that seems only to have had one performance in London - Clement admitted that no, he had not. Meanwhile I had seen Altynai Asylmuratova dance Giselle and knew that Clement had not. These mere facts did not stop Clement from continuing to claim he had seen every Giselle of note.)

In 1956, with some experience of criticism behind him, he began to contribute to the young arts page of the Financial Times. Porter was already there as its chief music critic, its chief dance critic, and an exemplary and advisory figure in the development of FT critical style. Crisp remained the paper’s second dance critic until 1972, when Porter moved to New York as music critic to The New Yorker. From 1966 to 1970, Crisp also wrote for The Spectator until the FT paid him a sufficient retainer for him to leave that weekly magazine.

And he wrote for other publications. The first instance of the joint names “Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp” of which I know occurred in 1963, when they jointly wrote the twenty-page “Ballet in London, 1962-63” report in Ballet Annual 18.

III.

David Bintley once choreographed a ballet for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden named The Sons of Horus: it shared a programme with the Shades scene from La Bayadère. Clement presented me with this limerick:

“The Sons of Hor-

us was sent to bore

us. La Bayadère,

au contraire,

was made to adore.”

Somewhere around 1991, he and I played “Desert Island Ballets”, choosing eight dance works from the many, but not more than one by any choreographer. As I recall, Clement’s eight, in chronological order, were August Bournonville’s Napoli (1842), Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty (1890), Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc (1943), Frederick Ashton’s Scènes de ballet (1948), George Balanchine’s Divertimento no 15 (1956), Paul Taylor’s Esplanade (1975), Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling (1978), and Twyla Tharp’s Baker’s Dozen (1979). As this list (like his limerick’s ending about La Bayadère), begins to show, Clement was a devotee of high ballet classicism - academic, hierarchical, sexist, ultra-refined - though not exclusively. Very few British or American dance observers would place Lifar in their pantheon, but Clement’s attachment to the Paris Opéra style, as developed by Lifar, went deep. He loved academicism as well as classicism - there are many differences between the two, as well as many overlaps - and sometimes went way too far in issuing decrees about what was correct. (More than once he blamed the Royal Ballet and other companies for presenting a cut version of Tchaikovsky’s score for The Sleeping Beauty, regardless of the fact that Tchaikovsky had allowed Petipa to cut it at its 1890 premiere. He tried to thunder about Matthew Bourne desecrating Swan Lake as if the 1895 Petipa-Ivanov version of Swan Lake was Holy Writ, though he knew full well that the Petipa-Ivanov edition was a drastic posthumous rearrangement of Tchaikovsky’s 1877 score.) In one early-1980s conversation, he waxed so lyrical about the greatness of the Vaganova school and Kirov Ballet that he actually said that Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov should never have defected to the West.

It may be argued that Taylor’s Esplanade and Tharp’s Baker’s Dozen are classical, but they are far from academic ballet. MacMillan’s Mayerling is ballet, but much of it is anti-classical.  It says much about Clement that he, with his adoration of the most exalted qualities of ballet classicism, had extensive room in his heart for dances so far away from its orthodoxy.

IV.

For many years, he gave weekly lectures to diploma students at the College of the Royal Academy of Dance. Not all of them realised how playful he loved to be. In the early 1980s, I replaced him a few times, at his request, when he was making two- or three-week visits to New York. When I explained to the third-year College students that Nijinsky in L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912) was far more serious about sexuality than Fokine had been in Schéhérazade (1910), I remarked that the Schéhérazade orgy amounted to little more than slaves feeding grapes to harem wives on divan cushions. One student promptly raised her hand: “Sir, is that really what happens in Schéhérazade? Mr Crisp said they were playing Monopoly! I’ve got it in my notes.”

Clement was also the first tutor and lecturer in dance history at M.A. level at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, a course he taught for some six years in the 1980s. With his permission - I was teaching dance history to the B.A. students there - I attended all his M.A. lectures for the academic year 1984-1985. Even though I had known and read Clement for several years then, the brilliance of those lectures astounded me. He would begin by speaking for some forty-five minutes without interruption (though he admired the rare student who stopped his flow with a good question or objection), absolutely without notes: his words drew upon expert knowledge of all the sources while showing an acute grasp of political, economic, and social conditions. The course focused on twentieth-century dance; Clement devoted the first term to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. When it came to American modern dance, he asked the students to give seminars on individual topics. Probably this was because here he was less omniscient. Even so, one student loved to recall how, in the middle of her presentation on Doris Humphrey, she paused wryly to observe that all the important men in Humphrey’s life had the initials CW (husband Charles Woodford; colleague Charles Weidman). Quick as a flash, Crisp exclaimed: “Oh yes - like José Limón!”

What’s a teacher? Some would say that Crisp was not a teacher at all. That’s to say, he did not draw his students out. Instead, he compelled their respect and entertained them with his humour, but much of what he said was a performance way above their heads. (When he spoke on Diaghilev, I myself felt I could barely keep up.)

That said, several of his students went on to hold important posts in dance institutions in Britain and America. They recall his lectures with gratitude and awe.

V.

Clement was a good hater. In the FT, he referred to Hans van Manen’s Grosse Fuge as “the cloaca maxima of choreography”. He likened more than one choreographic horror to the torments of the dentist’s chair. At the end of a Christmas 2015 email to me, he added a parenthetical warning about six choreographers to avoid: “all of them beads on the devil’s rosary!”

But he was also a devotee and friend of certain choreographers and dancers. Notable among these Crisp friends were Serge Lifar, Alicia Markova, Roland Petit, Zizi Jeanmaire, Nadia Nerina, Yuri Grigorovich, Kenneth MacMillan, Paul Taylor, Lynn Seymour, Natalia Makarova, Twyla Tharp, Lyudmila Semenyaka, Merrill Ashley, and Irek Mukhamedov. (Among these, Tharp was an exception. In the 1980s, she was among the artists to whom he was devoted: her signed photograph of her was on display in his drawing room. In later years, however, he had no time for her subsequent work.)

No issue in practical criticism is harder to determine than the correct degree of distance between artist and writer. Monica Mason has recalled that, in the early 1960s, the Royal Ballet disapproved of dancers accompanying critics to any performances or of other signs of fraternisation. Clement’s degree of friendship with several artists went the opposite way, however – far beyond the norm for his generation. This reached its most controversial in his friendship with MacMillan, who was more distressed by bad reviews than most artists. The first newspaper to break the news that MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet (1965) had been created for Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable rather than Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev (who were given the first night) was the FT, in Porter’s review – and it had been Clement who made sure Porter knew of the importance of the Seymour-Gable cast. (Porter’s review of the Fonteyn-Nureyev premiere informed readers that the production could not be fully judged until the Seymour-Gable cast had been seen.) As Jann Parry discovered when researching her MacMillan biography (Different Drummer, 2010), Clement wrote gossipy and indiscreet letters to MacMillan through the latter’s 1966-1969 years in Berlin. When MacMillan became director of the Royal Ballet, he even took refuge for a while – during a period of greatest torment - in Crisp’s home. Clement never suggested in print that any of MacMillan’s works were inadequate – though in private he did. In conversation, he later admitted that 6.6.98 (1978) had been poor and proposed that even such renowned works as The Invitation (1960) would not stand re-examination: those who knew his opinions solely from his published reviews never realised this. Over many years, he put pressure on his fellow judges of the Evening Standard Dance Award (as one of them told me^[2]) to vote for MacMillan or for artists whom MacMillan currently valued most. (Lynn Seymour, David Wall, Wayne Eagling, Stephen Jefferies, Nicolas Georgiadis, Alessandra Ferri all won the Standard prize.) One of Clement’s oldest friends told me how, when Clement called MacMillan to give him advance notice that he had engineered the prize for Darcey Bussell after she had created the leading role in MacMillan’s new three-act production of The Prince of the Pagodas, MacMillan bitterly rebuked him: the prize, MacMillan told Clement, should have gone not to Bussell but to himself.^[3] Clement was greatly distressed by this - it takes little knowledge of MacMillan’s life to know that he was an alarming virtuoso of manipulative passive aggression, trumpeting his sufferings to maximum effect. Clement nonetheless stayed loyal to MacMillan; their friends soon effected a complete rapprochement.

More than that, Clement proved MacMillan’s most insightful admirer, vividly drawing attention to revealing details of choreography or individual acting interpretation. Even though he was consistently an advocate of the Petipa-Balanchine tradition of ballet classicism, he genuinely loved the subversive and dark sides of MacMillan’s art; and even though he cherished the atmosphere of the Royal Opera House at its most formally traditional, he relished MacMillan’s courage in shaking up its prettinesses and complacency. A number of longterm observers of the Royal Ballet felt that MacMillan in the 1970s and 1980s led it away from classical style - it’s worth reading the successive reviews of Arlene Croce (who in New York was seen as kinder to MacMillan than most), including the one where she wrote that the Royal Ballet was lucky to have had MacMillan, since, once it ceased to be a classical company, he had given it something else to believe in.^[4] But Clement - though he privately admitted that the Royal’s decline as a classical company began under MacMillan’s artistic directorship - was never one of those who felt that MacMillan actually led the Royal away from classicism.

Like a number of British and European critics over the decades, Clement often allowed foreign dance companies to pay for his flights and hotels. (The FT no longer allows this.) Still, the Royal Danish Ballet and others were shocked when - I think the year was 1987 - Clement accepted flights and board for a trip to watch an international festival in Copenhagen yet chose not to see the Royal Danish Ballet itself. (On this occasion, Clement probably knew he had gone too far. He spoke about it like a naughty boy who knew he had just managed to break the rules, this once.)

Clement, especially when he was the FT’s only London dance critic in 1972-1987, demonstrated various agendas at various times - in ways sometimes impossible to deduce. Generally an admirer of the choreographer Richard Alston, he recognised that Alston was doing some of his finest work in the mid-1980s for the Ballet Rambert (which now became the Rambert Dance Company). He wasn’t alone: Frederick Ashton became a regular attendee of Rambert performances at this time; Lynn Seymour said in interview that the Rambert was doing the finest dancing in Britain; the company won awards; the quality of designs by painters and sculptors was more Diaghilevian than British dance has ever achieved since. In 1987, Alston collaborated with the painter Howard Hodgkin (their second joint venture) on a staging of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Critics had three chances to review this during 1987: out of town in its first months, at Sadler’s Wells in the spring, and then at the Battersea Big Top in the summer. Yet Clement somehow avoided all of these, perhaps because a rival choreographer had expressed interest in Pulcinella.

He claimed that health prevented him from attending the London premiere; perhaps it did. But when the FT’s New York dance critic, David Vaughan, a known admirer of Alston’s work then visiting London, proposed to the FT that, in the absence of a Crisp review of this obviously important creation, he should step in with his own review to fill the breach, Clement hit the roof. Perhaps because he knew I was a friend of Vaughan’s, he told me of this with great anger, though I was not myself contributing to the FT at this stage. Vaughan’s effort to review Pulcinella was duly quashed, I’m not sure how. Though this new Alston-Hodgkin Pulcinella was a work for which Ashton complimented Alston (“You’ve illumined the music”), the FT never reviewed it.

The word “political” is used in various ways of critics. One such way arises when a critic acts as a support group or lobbyist, advocating this or that person for this prestigious post, campaigning for the removal of the current occupant of a different job, applying pressure on those who fund artists. Clement was by no means the only British dance critic who busied himself with such “political” agenda; but he was certainly one. Sometimes he was at his most foolish in telling his friends who he wanted to be appointed as the next director of the Royal Ballet. (In one case, he wanted that post to go to a man who quite soon had to be removed from a lesser job after complaints of several kinds. Clement’s argument for backing this candidate had merely been this: “He’s planning to tell all the dancers they’re not nearly good enough. And that’s what they need.”)

Regular readers of Clement’s reviews could scarcely miss his loyalty to MacMillan. That, however, occasioned less comment than his devotion to Makarova and to the two leading Russian ballet companies, the Kirov/Maryinsky and the Bolshoi. It had become renowned that Makarova never danced Swan Lake the same way twice; in October 1976, Clement reviewed her latest Royal Ballet Swan Lake Odette in the FT by saying that on this occasion she had given us Odette as Mélisande. Years later, he revealed that, on the day of the performance, Makarova had said “How shall I play Odette tonight?” and that it had been he himself who had proposed the character of Mélisande.) In 2003, when Makarova directed a new production of The Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden, Clement contradicted himself in print, writing glowingly in the programme of the Maryinsky tradition of casting children in supporting roles in this ballet, then deploring those performing children in his FT review. London seasons of the Bolshoi presented by Victor and Lilian Hochhauser usually were accompanied by Crisp paeans in the programme; he was treated by both Bolshoi and Maryinsky as a special figure and granted particular access to their luminaries. In the years Clement was watching those companies, they changed their traditions and dance texts in many details, but Clement (capable of pedanticism in such matters when he chose) rode over these alterations with magnificent blindness. It was hard not to remember how, especially in 1979, he had rebuked the men of the Royal Ballet and other Western companies for executing double tours en l’air to fifth position with less precision than the Kirov in the peasant dances of Act One of Giselle (he had recently been watching the Kirov in Paris) - and harder not to notice how Clement subsequently made no mention of the mid-1980s changes to that Giselle whereby the peasant men no longer executed double tours at all. Both Bolshoi and Kirov kept changing their acts, again and again, during the years Clement was reviewing them; Clement wrote benignly about almost all such changes.

VI.

What is now the Society for Dance Research took its roots directly from a weekend-long conference in Piccadilly, London, in April 1980. (It was the weekend Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.) The speakers included Clement, Richard Glasstone, Ivor Guest, Belinda Quirey, Richard Ralph. For myself, a dance critic in my late twenties and just about to start my third year of teaching dance history at B.A. and M.A. level, this was a mind-opening weekend. Points made by Glasstone, Guest, and Quirey registered explosively in my mind, permanently enriching my sense of dance history.

Clement had already established himself as a friend of mine. He had introduced himself to me in March 1979 (“Hello. You’re Mary’s friend Alastair. I like your pieces in Dancing Times.”) Later that year, he had recommended me to the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, then the only institution offering a full-time B.A. course in dance in the United Kingdom; he felt I should teach dance history there. When I protested “But Clement! I know nothing about dance history, and I left academe behind years ago,” he replied, in a superb example of an academic snobbery, “Nonsense: you’ve been to Cambridge, you can think.”

Mental swagger of this kind was marvellously characteristic. His lecture at the 1982 conference had been given the title “The Critic’s Task”. He took the podium - for Clement, to lecture from any notes at all was bad form - with these blissfully outrageous words, permanently ingrained in my memory:

“My talk has a subtitle: ‘A Voice from the Harem, or The Eunuch’s Complaint’. Because my theme is the complete IMPOTENCE of the critic.”

He then reeled off a catalogue of terrible recent British and French productions of classic ballets, productions that he and others had shown to be fundamentally flawed in his reviews. His point was that these reviews had then been steadfastly ignored by the institutions in question. (His implication - questionable, shall we say - was that the leading institutions of ballet should learn from such reviews.)

When a dance academic, Janet Adshead of the University of Surrey, asked him “Mr Crisp, what are your criteria for judging a new work of dance?”, he gave her a beady look while answering:

“My criteria? I’ll tell you what you my criteria are. I have something called the Two-Minute Test. A work begins. You wait for something to happen to you. And if it hasn’t happened to you in the first two minutes, frankly, my dear, you know it’s a load of RUBBISH.’”

He then qualified this with one exception. Twyla Tharp, presenting a programme at the Roundhouse in 1974, had allowed several minutes to pass without showing anything of interest:

“And then suddenly she walked on and dropped an egg. And that had a certain profound rightness.”

To the more earnest-minded students of critical method, Clement’s words were shockingly frivolous. Yet Clement could get away with that, simply because he was so evidently keenly intelligent and highly knowledgeable. His quickness of mind was allergic to any schematic method in criticism or in scholarship.

And humour - including playfulness, pleasure in shock tactics, a delight in connecting diametric opposites -  was near his mind’s very core. I strongly suspect he, rather than Mary Clarke, was responsible for these introductory words on page 4 of their jointly written The History of Dance (1981):

“We dedicate this book to the memory of our critic ancestors, the old men on the island of Gaua in the New Hebrides who, according to Curt Sachs, used to stand by with bows and arrows and shoot at every dancer who made a mistake.^”5]

Mary may have been happy to lend her support to so naughty an inscription, but we can also be sure the thought and wording were derived from Clement.

He loved to scandalise. Often, he adopted positions more reactionary and insular than were actually true of him. When I was a young dance history teacher preparing to be grilled by external examiners about a B.A. syllabus in the early 1980s, I heard that they were expected to complain that this syllabus spent too much time on ballet and too little on modern dance. When I asked Clement for advice, he told me “Look them in the eyes and say ‘Frankly, my dears, what is modern dance anyway but bad ballet?” (I already knew that he adored and admired the modern-dance work of Paul Taylor, Robert Cohan, and Twyla Tharp. But nothing could stop his love of shock tactics.).

He loved, in print, to proclaim his loathing of performing children, and, in private, to proclaim his loathing of all children. Likewise other private remarks of his often went over the borderlines of misogyny and racism. Yet how sincere were these? It’s often observed that racists often say “Many of my best friends are Black/Jewish/of colour” - but Clement was the opposite: he was a true friend to several people of colour and to many women, but, with fabulous perversity, he behaved as if he would rather nobody knew. He even was good with - and kind to - certain children, and not just the children of his friends. One student of his recalled that she first encountered him on a beach, when she, a child, had lost her parents; Clement had helped her find them.

VII.

Although most of the books Clement wrote or co-wrote were about dance history, he himself liked to declare that he was neither a historian or scholar. In this, he differed from Porter, whose scholarship on a number of Verdi operas remains well established. (Porter was also a standard-setting translator of operas by Wagner and Mozart; his versions were long used by English National Opera and others.) It became famous that Porter, in 1970, had discovered extended passages (almost an hour of music) that Verdi had cut from Don Carlos before its world premiere in 1867 - music that has gone on to inform a number of subsequent productions and recordings.

Clement was not that kind of scholar. Nor were any of his dance writings in the league of research shown by, say, the late Joan Acocella (1945-2024), whose work on Nijinsky’s diaries and whose critical study of Mark Morris both show the kind of in-depth expansive analysis that Clement never attempted. Arlene Croce’s study The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1973) and several of her analytical essays in The New Yorker constitute real scholarship. Clive Barnes published The Ballets of Frederick Ashton for Dance Perspectives in 1961, the most valuable work on that choreographer until David Vaughan’s book appeared in 1977. Mary Clarke, before she began her long and productive collaboration with Clement on many books, had written two much-loved histories of British ballet companies that became invaluable sources, The Sadler’s Wells Ballet: A History and an Appreciation (1955) and Dancers of Mercury: The Story of the Ballet Rambert (1962). By comparison, Clement’s books on individual dancers (Ballerina: Portraits and Impressions of Nadia Nerina, 1975; Lynn Seymour: A Photographic Study, 1980) tended to be extensively pictorial. They contain superb nuggets of primary-source information, but they avoid the independently critical thought that Clement showed in conversation.

Yet there are scholars of Petipa and/or Balanchine and/or Ashton who lack Clement’s grasp of these choreographers’ work. His width of experience, his keen musical ear, his marvellous sense of the visual arts all gave him a keener penetration of a “new” Sleeping Beauty than many experts who have spent longer time combing the archives.

One of the many fascinating self-contradictions about Clement was that, while his reviews and conversation displayed his gleaming independence of thought, he was a natural co-author when it came to books. In 1970, Peter Brinson and he wrote Ballet for All; in 1978, Edward Thorpe and he wrote The Colourful World of Ballet. And yet it’s an effort to remember those two collaborations, because he wrote so many more with Mary. (The critic Dale Harris once ended a telephone conversation by saying “Well, while we’ve been talking, Mary and Clement have written another book.”) Between 1973 and 1992, she and he turned out a series of dance books with bewildering speed. Those works included Ballet, an illustrated history (two editions, 1973 and 1992), Making a Ballet: The Choreographer Speaks (1975), Understanding Ballet (1976), Design for Ballet (1978), Ballet in Art: from the Renaissance to the Present (1978), The Ballet-Goer’s Guide (1981), The History of Dance (1981), part of The Royal Opera House Covent Garden 1732-1982 (1982), How to Enjoy Ballet (1982), Dancer: Men in Dance (1984), Ballerina: The Art of Women in Classical Ballet (1987), London Contemporary Dance Theatre: The First 21 Years (1989) and parts of Rambert - a celebration: a survey of the company’s first seventy years(1996). In the pages of Dance Research, Clarke recalled that Crisp was proudest of the day when they finished work on one book and at once began on the next.

VIII.

Mary was my senior by thirty-two years, Clement by twenty-nine. Since I became friends with them - and learnt much from them - while they were in the first half of their prolific collaboration, it’s worth relating something of their friendship and their process.

In those years, Mary and Clement lived in houses five minutes’ walk away from each other in Islington, she in Danbury Street, he in Arlington Square. When you remember how much else they did - both she and he were often writing several newspaper reviews a week (Mary was the main dance critic of The Guardian from 1977 to 1991); she was editing the monthly Dancing Times between 1963 and 1998; Clement taught at the Royal Academy of Dancing (as it then was named) and other establishments for many years - the achievement of their many books becomes astonishing.

Mary’s first job had been at Reuters during the Second World War: she once said that she was the only person who could type as fast as Clement could speak. But were you to infer from those words that he gave dictation while she merely transcribed, you would fail to understand her. All of us who knew them could be pretty sure that Mary - nobody’s puppet – edited Clement as they proceeded, making her own contributions often enough. Clement voted Conservative and enjoyed Crossroads on television (probably because it was more absurd, though he would always say “That’s real life”); Mary voted Labour and enjoyed Coronation Street. Mary adored Chekhov’s plays, Stoppard’s Arcadia, and Dick Francis, Crisp loved Racine, Trollope, and Dr Who. She worshipped Shakespeare, whose faults he enjoyed observing; he revered Dickens, whom she resisted.

Clement always spoke of Mary with great respect. (He delivered the main eulogy at her funeral in 2014.) He once, however, said to me (in 1986) “She’s my best friend - and I don’t know who she is.” He meant that she never confided her personal history or private life to him. Whereas she was one of the guests he welcomed to his house, she seldom if ever entertained any guests in hers. To me, Clement therefore ventured some speculations about her family and private life: he had deduced, from her frequent mentions of her mother, from her silence about her father, and from the few references she made to heterosexual men that she had been an illegitimate child and that her own sexual experience was small. I was intrigued that Clement spoke this way at all. (Probably he did so because he rightly guessed that I, then living in the bottom half of Mary’s house, knew something of her life he did not.) In later years, however, I came to learn that both his guesses about her had been mistaken. Her parents had been married. She had had important affairs with men.

Yet, although Mary was discreet about some personal matters, she was open about others where Clement was not. There was, for example, no mystery about her birth date: 23 August, 1923. In 1994, I lectured on sexual matters in Ashton choreography at the Roehampton conference Following Sir Fred’s Steps, drawing attention to the significance of the ballet Tiresias (which concerned Tiresias’s sexual experience as both male and female, and therefore demonstrated the greater pleasure taken by women from the sexual act). The next morning, Mary, phoning me with congratulations, added the Parthian shot, “And I’m here to say Tiresias was right.” (Such a remark transformed one’s idea of Mary, even after sixteen years of friendship.)

Mary, very occasionally, was more openly critical of a few of Clement’s reviews than he ever was of hers. Admittedly, he never bought The Guardian, whereas the FT was one of the three daily newspapers she always had delivered to her house. He, always taking The Daily Telegraph (in addition to the FT), often spoke about its dance reviews, usually with contempt.^[6] (Kathrine Sorley-Walker was the only Telegraph dance critic of whom he did not complain, frequently.) But it was not in Clement’s nature to let anyone know that he thought Mary - or any of his best friends - was wrong.

Mary, by contrast, spotted occasions when Clement had so firmly pinned his colours to a dancer that he would not admit any falling-off. Of his radiant 1989 FT reviews of the Bolshoi ballerina Lyudmila Semenyaka, Mary tetchily remarked “He’s still writing about the wonderful Aurora we saw her dance in Vienna in 1985. He just won’t acknowledge the mannered creature she has now become.” When Clement in the early 1990s (after some earlier changes of tack) adopted a steadfastly negative approach to the dancing of Sylvie Guillem, he nonetheless reviewed admiringly her 1992 debut in Frederick Ashton’s A Month in the Country. When I expressed surprise to Mary, she, with characteristic shrewdness, attributed Crisp’s review to the fact that he had taken his rich American friend Cathy Curran to that performance. Mary - whose wide blue eyes often made her the dance world’s Miss Marple - said “Cathy likes to have a good time when Clement takes her to a performance. So he praised Guillem in print, to assure Cathy they’d seen something exciting.”

Such remarks from Mary were nonetheless atypical. She could happily quote lines Clement had written years before; she admired many of those of his reviews that completely differed in opinion from her own.^[7] For Dance Research, she wrote a tribute to him in 2003 that showed how exemplary she felt his achievement was as a critic. With characteristic modesty, she drew no attention to her own work, though she had begun eleven years before him. It contained this interesting paragraph:

“His first duty, he always maintains, is to his readers. He cares not a jot for the reactions of the companies about which he writes – although he never shirks opportunities to chastise boards of governors who, he feels, are, through ignorance, impeding the work of the artists he loves. He has, from the beginning, sought to learn about the art of dancing from the artists he admires, from friends among choreographers, dancers, and teachers. He once said that Alicia Markova was ‘his university’ and he acknowledges an enormous debt to the pedagogue Vera Volkova and later to that great mentor Lincoln Kirstein. He has a gift, rare among dance critics, to profit from friendships within the profession without in any way compromised in his judgements on their work. It is this integrity and loyalty, I believe, which has earned him the respect of the profession. Supreme accolade for a critic.”

This was generous. In other circumstances, Mary would probably have admitted that some of Clement’s judgements – on MacMillan, the Bolshoi Ballet, the Kirov (Maryinsky) Ballet, Natalia Makarova, and others – were compromised by his close loyalty to the artists concerned. This compromise extended to one of the books she wrote with him. London Contemporary Dance Theatre was written for the company’s prime founder Robin Howard, whom they liked and admired. While writing it, they admitted to their researcher, Angela Kane, that they were being kinder about the company’s most recent season than it merited.

As a rule, though, Mary kept the degree of distance from artists that made her more capable than Clement of discussing a decline or a failure of inspiration in people she knew. In print and conversation, Clement always spoke of Markova - whom he visited for lunch most weeks - with passionate enthusiasm. In 1979, Clement gushed, retrospectively, once too often about the revelation afforded by Markova’s dancing when he first saw her in 1948 after her eight-year absence in New York. Quickly, gently, but firmly, Mary firmly observed, to him and me, that Markova’s prime had been in the early 1940s in New York - and that Markova had all too evidently already passed that prime when, after eight years, she returned to London.

(For all his adoration of Markova, Clement could sometimes admit her flaws. I once tentatively asked if I was right to sense that, under her demure exterior, she had an ego the size of the Albert Hall. Clement replied “AND the Albert Memorial. AND the whole of Hyde Park.”)

In 1985-1988, I was Mary’s downstairs lodger, occupying the ground floor and basement of her Islington house. At 9am one Sunday morning in 1986, she set off to begin work on their Ballerina book in Clement’s home. Returning at 1pm, she called out to me, as she passed through the hall, “Four thousand words in a morning! I don’t call that bad.”

Far more than most critics, Mary and Clarke steeped themselves in the writings of other dance historians. (Of another senior critic whom Mary valued as a friend but whose work Clement held in scorn, Mary once - and rightly - remarked to me that she had often told him that he should have a better grasp of dance history.)

Therefore Mary and Clement would begin each collaboration with a very considerable prior grasp of the area. Where they could not remember precise facts, they always knew where to ascertain them. In 1986, about the investigative work that they did on Ballerina, she laughingly observed “We’re saying that, if you take from just one book, it’s plagiarism, but that, if you take from sixteen, it’s research.” (Actually, any quick check will show you they usually consulted a far greater number than sixteen even for individual chapters.)

She once recalled that, for their first collaboration, Ballet, an illustrated history (1973), they each wrote alternating chapters independently of each other - I’ve never been sure which chapters were whose work - but that they then came together to write the captions. Those captions were, she said, when their friendship began, as they paused to exchange news (“Have you heard…?”). After that, they usually wrote their books in the same room, with Mary as the quicksilver typist. (And those captions remain marvellous, giving information that deepens appreciation.)

You might therefore presume that the many books Mary and Clement wrote together therefore amount to mere hackwork. If so, you’d be wrong. When you turn to re-examine the Clarke-Crisp books now, you find they’re written with good sense, authority, elegance, and humour. They also graciously draw attention to the work of individual scholars on particular areas, while they demonstrate a strong sense of social, political, and artistic context. Ballet, an illustrated history easily establishes an intelligent tone that opens up ballet to non-specialists. In no other history of dance will you find a remark as simply useful as this about the published works of the first dancing masters of the Italian Renaissance:

 “…researchers have been able to reconstruct the early dances and many of these early books have been re-published in recent years in paperback form, easily available to all students. They are concerned, of course, with dancing as a social grace and they give much guidance about polite behaviour. They are also illustrated with quaint and delightful drawings - but dance teachers are not necessarily good draughtsmen. For an idea of dancing, dress and deportment in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it is safer to study the works of the great painters: Botticelli’s graceful ladies and his angels dancing in a heavenly circle above the crib in the London National Gallery’s Nativity.^8]”

At no point does their prose ever turn into fan-level gush. The same book’s chapter on “Today’s Ballet” has the admonitory sentence “The Dutch National Ballet, with a big and somewhat unwieldy repertory, needs stronger classical training if it is to sustain the older ballets in the repertory.” Two photographs show Tamara Karsavina in her Imperial Russian roles. The second is captioned thus:

“…as Medora in Le Corsaire, a photograph signed with the date 1909 but probably taken at least a year earlier. Karsavina said that the rôle was a milestone in her career. ‘Blind groping was left behind; I could now see my way clear down the long path to my ideal.’”

Those few words, charmingly, enrich a photograph with layers of historical insight.

Turn to their chapter on the Romantic ballet. Its opening paragraph addresses the political, industrial, and intellectual changes of the late eighteenth century. The ensuing paragraph touches on individual works by Beethoven, Weber, Meyerbeer, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Lamartine, Géricault, Berlioz, and others. In the 1980s, I was teaching dance history to B.A.students, many of whom were unused to historical study. Ballet, an Illustrated History was, like other Clarke-Crisp works, a perfect starting point to which to send them. (Kirstein’s peculiar prose was more than many of those students could take.) The Clarke-Crisp books are also distinguished by very high levels of historical accuracy and precision. Although they both admired - and were indebted to - the work of Ivor Guest, they could never have made the mistakes that occur in a few of his many books. The dance-history writings of Kirstein, Guest, and Jennifer Homans, each have more errors than are to be found anywhere in Clarke-Crisp.

IX.

Both Clarke and Crisp were steeped in Western culture. Yet everyone should read their introduction to The History of Dance, especially the paragraphs that begin thus:

“A major difference exists between dance in the East and the West. It has to do with the original impulse behind so much dancing throughout the world, its inspirational spring in the religious life and faith of its practitioners. In what may acceptably be defined as ‘high’ cultures, in Classic Greece, in Ancient Egypt, the act of worship was initially accompanied by dance… The dance of the Orient, of India, thus remained - and in many cases remains - in direct contact with the spiritual life of the people: it is still ‘inspired’ dancing.

“In the West, the dance has lost this contact. In neither folk nor theatrical dance can such a profound unity with the spiritual existence of a people be seen…. The dance in the West finds its richest sources not in man’s relationship to God or to the natural world, but in man’s concern with his own psyche. Dance in the theatre today, apart from its ephemerally amusing aspects, has a dual identity: it can be seen as the exploration of the inner landscape of man’s feelings, or as a non-representational art concerned with its own spatial and temporal existence as movement, as in the masterpieces of George Balanchine.”

The prose here sounds more Crisp than Clarke. And Clement is also yet more identifiable in the enthusiasm of the same book’s pages on the Nōh and Kabuki forms of Japan. (He once told me that Nōh was greater than classical ballet.) On Nōh, in the same History of Dance: 

“Not as ancient as Gagaku, but nevertheless representing seven centuries of performance, the Noh theatre is an art of illustrious traditions, piercing beauty and the greatest refinement in its dance element…. Identified under the general title of Noh-Mai, Noh dance might seem meaningless save in the context of the drama whose essence it is. It is an art which has been refined and stylized, subjected to all the subtleties and exquisite gradations of sensibility of which the Japanese aesthetic consciousness is capable. Noh, so pure, so dense, so entirely gripping, to those prepared to understand it and accept its formal distinction, is an art in which experience is abstracted, purged, given its most intense expression, and its dance reflects those attitudes exactly….”

X.

It is harder for me to write of Mary and Clement than of any other figures in dance. On the one hand, they were friends who encouraged me and gave me work as a young critic. (Although Mary was not the one who first introduced me to contribute to The Guardian nor Clement to the Financial Times, each was swift to share part of her/her work at either paper with me thereafter.) On the other, they occasionally infantilised: Clement far more so. (In some missives, he addressed me as “Childie”. At the 1979 Bournonville Festival in Copenhagen, when they introduced me to some senior American critics, Clement added “He’s our baby.”)

Because they both took me as a companion to many performances, people in the dance establishment would contact them when I had written controversial reviews. In December 1979, Mary received a complaint about me from none other than Ninette de Valois, who apparently said “The young man is not to be allowed to write” as I had in a Dancing Times review of her own Royal Ballet production of The Sleeping Beauty, then entering its third season. I was an angry young critic; I blasted away; Mary, bless her, stood by me. Knowing that I would have been shaken to know the complaint came from de Valois, she simply told me that it came from “someone very high in the establishment”; that she did not think it was justified; and that she would not be replying. Four months later, I wrote a no less angry essay about other Royal Ballet repertory, but now my arguments had greater depth. Mary now delighted to tell me how De Valois had come up to her at a ballet party to say “The young man’s entirely forgiven. Now that’s criticism!”

Later in 1980, however, I encountered another side of Mary; of Clement, too. In the monthly newspaper Ritz, I published an essay that knocked a number of current principal dancers in more than one British company. The ballet fan Charles Murland - who was on the board of London Festival Ballet (and of whom Clement privately said “He thinks that the sun shines from any orifice that Rudolf Nureyev chooses to point in his direction”) - complained to Mary and to Clement in furious terms. Mary, once she had read my piece, dismissed his complaints as “Storm in a teacup” and admitted that she found much of what I had written to be very funny. Clement, by contrast, rebuked me, sternly, merely for having the wrong opinions about certain French étoiles. Murland meanwhile tried to get four leading English companies (the Royal at Covent Garden, London Festival Ballet, Ballet Rambert, London Contemporary Dance Theatre) to strike me off their press lists; only with Festival Ballet did he succeed. (It reinstated me after his death, not many years later.) Over the weeks that followed, however, Mary weakened and tried to be more severe with me, whereas Clement continued to make our differences ones of mere opinion, as if criticism were merely a matter of right versus wrong.

None of us were to forget that trouble zone. When Mary, three years later, had cause to remember one of my jokes in that 1980 Ritz piece, she asked me to send it to her so that she could share it with friends. I was unamused by this inconsistency. Whereas Mary had been the ideal champion to a young writer when it came to Ninette de Valois, now she wavered to and fro. Neither she nor Clement rose in my opinion in consequence. Though they were proud to be independent from the ballet establishment in some cases, they preferred to remain close to that same establishment. (David Vaughan’s adjective for Mary was “teacuppy”.) This angry young man needed a stance different from theirs.

Sometimes in the 1980s I covered the same ground as Mary in The Guardian; sometimes in 1988-2003 I covered the same ground as Clement in the FT. In general, Mary was absolutely generous about differences of opinion. Clement, however, took offence from them: views he did not espouse were wrong, and that was that. With one choreographer alone, however, they were both protective: the paranoid Kenneth MacMillan, whose work they reviewed on almost every occasion. After I had reviewed MacMillan’s revised Baiser de la fée for The Guardian and Dancing Times in 1986, and after I had reviewed his Farewell pas de deux for the FT in 1990, I was not allowed near MacMillan choreography again in those pages.

In both 1988 and 1992, I became guest dance critic to The New Yorker for six months, at a time when Arlene Croce (taking sabbaticals each time) had made that a peak job in dance criticism. I was in my thirties; the experience transformed my writing. Years later, Clement admitted that he and Mary were grateful that I, on my return, had not marched in to take their jobs from them. To me, that would have been unthinkable: I owed them too much. Mary in 1989 did once casually suggest that I should now replace her as the Guardian dance critic; in reply, I gently suggested that, while she was still enjoying it, she should continue. Two years later, when I was now much busier at the Financial Times, I had the awkward task of telling her (“Are you sitting down?”) that she was about to be replaced at The Guardian by Judith Mackrell. Mary asked me if I was sure. I said that I had been skeptical when I had heard it from one Guardian source, but that now I had heard it again from a quite different source close to Mackrell (the late Bob Lockyer). Mary, immediately resigning herself to the inevitable, gave her resignation to The Guardian the next morning, so that the transition occurred without acrimony.

Neither Mary nor Clement was quite comfortable when, sixteen years later (2007), I was appointed chief dance critic of the New York Times. I wasn’t quite comfortable about it either, but I wrote to each to thank them for the great help they can given me over the years. The friendships continued.

But the swagger in Clement’s performative behaviour in intervals of ballets sometimes took on a new edge. At one Royal Ballet press night for The Nutcracker, I was accompanied by an old friend I had known longer than I had known Clement, but who was not part of the dance world. Clement’s conversation was - as always - entertaining, charming, but surprisingly determined to try influencing my own opinion, again and again. When he finally departed, she (a wife and grandmother) turned to me and said “That’s the classroom bully.” She wasn’t wrong.

XI.

In 2021, the year before his death, a collection of Clement’s reviews was published, lovingly edited by Gerald Dowler as 320 large pages of Clement Crisp Reviews: Six Decades of Dance.  It abounds in the best Crisp virtues. He was a virtuoso stylist. Few have equalled Clement’s skill in breathtaking opening lines (“Homosexual murder and necrophilia might not seem the most promising matters for a dance piece, but….”). Nobody has matched his enchanting genius in turning devastating negativity into high entertainment:

“I suppose we must be at war with Belgium. How else to explain the vicious attack on the Barbican’s public by the Brussels-based troupe Rosas under the command of Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker on Thursday night? The weapon was de Keersmaeker’s staging of i Said i. (Incomprehensible in every sense.) This was unprovoked exposure to Eurotrash dance – as horrible in its way as napalm – and I report on the event with scares still fresh. We were subjected to the devices of ‘physical theatre’, that bastard term, for two and a half hours, without interval, battered by platitudes, shouting, clutter, fearful noise, and even more fearsome posturing and capering. There must, surely, be something in the Hague Convention that forbids such sense-rotting tosh. I urge reprisals: a bombardment with episodes of the revived Crossroads or exposure to Tracey Emin’s bed installation might be a good starter.^[9]”

And how about this?

“A closing sequence offers the uninviting spectacle of the cast’s naked buttocks, generously displayed. Strictly for fans of cellulitis.^[10]”

If it often seems he was incapable of dullness or cliché, that’s in large part because he could stretch grammar to marvellously suspenseful ends. Who else but Crisp could begin a sentence with “Rather does he find pleasure”? I’m sorry that another quaint locution peculiar to him, “very other,” seems absent from this book. (“Very other is the programme’s final offering...”) It scarcely matters now that, though I often share his feelings about Pina Bausch’s genre of Tanztheater, I found her Masurca Fogo one of her most appealing works. (Part of it can be seen to fine effect in the superb Almodovár film Habla con Ella.) Instead I can only treasure this very Crisp sentence about it:

“I find it shapeless, pointless, teutonically portentous, and in danger of disappearing up its own mazurka.^[11]”

Clement Crisp Reviews reminds us that he actually did commit a few clichés – but they are clichés peculiar to him alone, and often when singing a performer’s praises. (“And we believe” comes round a few times too many.)

Some critics take you into the workings of their minds as they come to terms with aesthetic experience. With Crisp, that’s seldom so. In print as in life, he seems instead almost always to be giving a brilliant performance. (He truly did write his reviews immediately after the performance  - or the next morning - but they by no means always sound spontaneous. Some readers observed that many of them sounded as if they’d been prepared earlier. And to some degree they were. Some friends of Crisp noted that, roughly four weeks before a performance, he would start rehearsing what he might say, by bouncing his negative advance opinions off them. If you fought back with effectively intelligent enthusiasm about that choreographer or that company, you might well find echoes of your views in the review he subsequently filed.^[12])

Even so, there are a few moments in Clement Crisp Reviews when, touchingly, he relaxes to let a work of art’s possible meanings reverberate in his imagination. From a 1998 review of Ashton’s last three-act ballet:

“What I love about Ondine is its uncertainties, as if the emotional ground moves under our feet, and we traverse a dream-world of the unexplained. Ondine is child-like, but becomes a tragic figure in the final scene. Who is Palemon, a hero riven by romantic frenzy and indecision? Is Berta’s passion for him mere jealous pique? Set in a dramatic scene as uncertain and dangerous as water itself, the tragedy is borne along on an impulse as irresistible as a river in flood. All these images resonate throughout the ballet, pulling us along with them in marvellous fashion.^[13]”

Clement is lovably in love with pure movement and its histories when he writes on the Sadler’s Wells hip-hop Breakin’ Convention:

“Of prime significance is the way in which the dance continues to evolve. It is born inalienably of its music, and dancers and audience know the minutiae of breaking and popping, of boogaloo (that marionette-like sloping dance as walk) and locking – as well as the latest fashion from Los Angeles, krumping.

“Influences are absorbed with lightning speed (it is like the technical development of classical ballet speeded up 100 times). As I watched some of the aspirant breakers – the dashing Boy Blue team and the Holloway Boyz, I started to list this electric, eclectic dance-brew. There were acrobatics, moon-walking, ten-pin bowling, fighting, gymnastics, belly-dancing, the adorably grubby ‘bumps and grinds’ of old American burlesque shows, tap, puppetry, scratch-DJ sound (an essential formative influence), and even ballet….

“Steps become observation as these youngsters see it, youthfully aspiring, youthfully rebellious. Others may use their dance, commercialise it, corrupt it, but the young go on making it different, making it because they must.”

This is gorgeous writing, sensual, canny, wonderfully analytical: it’s even innocent. Any longterm follower of Crisp’s writing will be happily astounded that this frequently reactionary traditionalist here takes joy from the rapidity of change in dance movement, and that he has the vocabulary to meet this youthful phenomenon. Now turn back to his long and brilliantly analytical review of the Royal Ballet’s 1977 production of The Sleeping Beauty, far less joyous, but superb in its wealth of knowledge of this ballet’s performance history. In one passage he comes close to capturing what he loved about classical ballet itself:

“The initial merit of this production can be seen in the way the solos and ensembles have been transmitted to the dancers by de Valois and Ashton: the cleanness of execution, the nuances of phrasing, are evidence of care and loving thought. The ensembles have, in the main, the openness, the light-refracting brilliance of design that we now associate with Petipa. This is particularly good in the Prologue and the first act, where the Fairy ballabili, the sequences for Aurora and her friends, demonstrate a beautiful symmetry. Aurora’s dances – marvellously clear, academically pure; amazing at each viewing – are exceptionally well refurbished; throughout the first two acts the logic and precision of patterning and structural development (so vital in Petipa) are most happy.^[14]”

 But he has much else to relate of this production’s text, decor, costuming; he can compare the sets to architecture by Hawksmoor, Sanquirico, Bibiena; but he likens one character’s garb to “a cross between Gaëtan Vestris and Prince Ras Monolulu”, and knocks Princess Aurora’s “little-girl puffed sleeves” and the profusion of “pendant lace, frills, embroidery, and winsome accessories (“the Prologue fairies seem to be dancing ‘against’ prettified fluster on their dress”).^[15] This is one of the many Crisp reviews I read before I knew him and before I became a critic myself: it gave me a trove of information - and, better, a richer sensibility with which to respond to dance. That production stayed in repertory fifteen years; Crisp came to admit that it was probably the world’s best. But his reviews may well be a reason why de Valois kept making small and large changes to the production during its first eighteen months, almost all for the better.

Four months later, he reviewed the world premiere of MacMillan’s three-act Mayerling. Again, he is in top form. (MacMillan allowed Crisp to attend dress rehearsals before premieres, enabling him to write an on-the-night review that was well prepared.^[16]) Amid a detailed account of the ballet, its complex drama, and its sensational pas de deux, Crisp makes an acute point about those duets:

“In none of them is there a suggestion of conventional romantic love: rather does each stress the isolated lovelessness that drives Rudolf deeper into despair.^[17]”

Even more acutely, he catches, in that review of the premiere, a passage where David Wall, the ballet’s original Crown Prince Rudolf, was uniquely eloquent.

“His most remarkable moment, for me, is one of complete immobility. At a party in the Hofburg, Franz Joseph’s mistress, the singer Katharina Schratt (Bernadette Greevy) entertains the courtiers with a song. Rudolf stands slightly apart, motionless and seething with emotion at his mother’s behaviour and his own impotence. It is a measure of Wall’s greatness in the role that we sense all Rudolf’s sadness: the tears he dare not shed are plain to see.^[18]”

Clement Crisp Reviews contains reviews of two other Rudolfs, Irek Mukhamedov and Edward Watson (I wish it also included his vivid review of Stephen Jefferies’s interpretation), but his high admiration for those dancers does not persuade me they surpassed Wall’s performance - or even that Clement thought they did.

Here we touch on one of the great difficulties of longevity in criticism, especially in frequent newspaper criticism: the critic is likely to feign a greater enthusiasm for later performances than he or she always feels. This book’s pages show us Clement reviewing, in a 2010 performance of the Royal Ballet in Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, the Colas of Steven McRae: “I do not recall a more dazzling account in many years – not, perhaps, since its creation by David Blair, 50 years ago.”^[19] This superlative is distinctly awkward, since it suggests that Crisp no longer recalls Mikhail Baryshnikov’s unsurpassed account of the same role in 1977 – or the review he wrote of it. Yet here that review is: it, too, abounds in superlatives, and proves yet more evocative than the later one of McRae.

Clement became more and more like that, in print and out of it. In 1982, he said that Élisabeth Platel’s Aurora (Paris Opéra) was the greatest he had seen since Irina Kolpakova’s Aurora (Kirov in London, 1961). Next, in 1985, he said that Lyudmila Semenyaka’s Aurora was the greatest since Kolpakova. (Of Clement’s rating of Kolpakova, more anon.)

Another danger of a critic’s staying in the saddle for decade after decade is that she or he may start to claim they saw an even more complete number of performances than s/he actually did. (Clement himself once encapsulated that syndrome with the words “I’m so old, I can remember Taglioni.”) I’ve already mentioned the bravado with which he enjoyed announcing in the FT that he had seen every important interpreter of Giselle since the Second World War even when he had been reminded that he hadn’t. When it came to his experience of Asylmuratova, Clement went in for reverse fabrication. In most cases, he was impressive in travelling to catch the new lead dancers of the Bolshoi and (Asylmuratova’s company) the Kirov, but with her he was less fortunate. As bad luck would have it, he missed all her 1982 performances with the Kirov in Paris, though he caught plenty else of that eight-week season. Others – notably the French critic Olivier Merlin and the American critic Arlene Croce – hailed her in the highest terms. I, like Croce, caught her in the Esmeralda pas de six that year; then in 1984, visiting Leningrad during the White Nights, I caught her as the title character of a new full-length ballet, Asiyat, by Oleg Vinogradov. In 1986, when the Kirov toured the United States, Croce reviewed Asylmuratova’s Nikiya in the Shades scene of La Bayadère; and in the winter of 1987-1988, by making successive weekend visits to Paris for another Kirov season, I caught her in that role, in the Paquita grand pas classique, as Nikiya in the Bayadère Shades scene, as Odette-Odile, and as Giselle. By this point, Clement, annoyed by all the praise meted out on a dancer he’d never seen, began to say “Actually, my Leningrad sources  say she’s really not very good.” Finally, however, he was impressed when I wrote an extended essay on her in The New Yorker in spring 1988. That helped to prepare him for the Kirov’s first London season for many years, that summer; so did the enthusiasm she now prompted from his close friend Makarova. Once he’d seen Asylmuratova, he loved her. Good - but less pleasing was the way he then claimed that he had been among her earliest admirers. He can be seen to do so twice in Clement Crisp Reviews. In the second (September 2012), he writes of Olga Smirnova: “Not since the earliest performances by Altynai Asylmuratova have I seen so luminous a debut.”^[20] Well, certainly he’d caught Smirnova’s debut (in the ballerina role of George Balanchine’s Diamonds, with the Bolshoi in Moscow) – but he hadn’t seen any debut by Asylmuratova until other Western critics had been praising her for six years.

More disturbing yet were those occasions when he said one thing and wrote another. There were many examples of this. On one occasion in 1999, Joan Acocella, who admired and liked Clement and was now dance critic to The New Yorker, called me in dismay because she had just seen his FT review of the New York City Ballet performances at which she had recently spoken to him. Crisp’s published review was completely in contradiction to what he had shared with her in conversation. You can read that review by him, spread over pages 48-51 of Clement Crisp Reviews. We can only speculate why Clement wrote that way: my own guess is that he felt obliged to please friends of his who served on the board of New York City Ballet by assuring readers that the company’s treasury of masterpieces by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins was in excellent condition. For those who noticed that some Crisp reviews took inconsistency over the threshold of hypocrisy, his stature as an authority became diminished and permanently damaged. And yet, and yet… In the greatest paradox of all, I have known a number of ethically more scrupulous critics who observed and wrote far less well than Clement.

Clement Crisp Reviews does not contain his review of a 1991 Copenhagen production of August Bournonville’s masterpiece A Folk Tale, which had designs by Queen Margrethe of Denmark. I was in the FT office the day after that review appeared. Our then Arts editor, the late J.D.F.Jones, asked me quietly what I made of Clement’s review. I answered that, without having seen that production yet, I found it disagreeably unctuous about its royal designer. Jones replied that Caroline Cross (our longterm Arts sub-editor) and he had felt obliged to excise four of Crisp’s five uses of the term “Her Majesty”. Even so, the one they left was enough to do the job: the next year, Queen Margrethe made Clement a Knight of the Royal Order of the Dannebrog.

In the years when I was busy as the FT’s chief theatre critic, thereby missing much dance, I once asked him about a Russian ballerina whom I had been told was embarrassingly bad. Clement’s fierce defence of the ballerina in question ended with the words “And besides, she’s got an extremely rich husband.” That was by no means the only rich husband who swung Clement’s opinion.

He was a wonderfully vivid reporter. (And perhaps no other critic has employed so many different ways to convey enthusiasm.) His accounts of Nōh Theatre, of Gagaku, of Kabuki are striking because they show his keen responsiveness to East Asian forms that are very far from Western traditions. Reading Clement Crisp Reviews, I’m also fascinated to learn of productions I never heard of, such as the Moscow-derived La Fille mal gardée he witnessed in Ljubljana in 1969: its stager – and its Widow Simone - was the eightytwo-year-old Alexandra Balashova, who had joined the Bolshoi in 1905 and had been obliged to leave Russia in 1921. A few turns of phrase (“Sincerity seems the key-note: there is far less of the humour that Ashton provides, the story is told in more innocent – almost naïf – terms and the characterisations are less complex”^[21]) lead me to suspect that Clement is feigning greater admiration than he feels, but the review still leads me to wish I could have seen that production. 

Clement was steadfastly loyal to his best friends. Opinions, however, might differ about who those friends were. Page 6 of Clement Crisp Reviews consists of seven tributes to him by eminent international dance figures. Five of those enjoyed (as far as I know) his unswerving devotion. A sixth, Monica Mason, had received some Crisp negativity when she was director of the Royal Ballet for ten years, though generally received his great admiration. But another of the seven “friends”, though always praised in print by Crisp, was at times spoken of by him with scorn. To Mary Clarke and to me, he relished mispronouncing that person’s name – except during a period of a few years in which he was all praise.

The late Charles France, assistant to Baryshnikov when the latter was director of American Ballet Theatre in the 1980s, remarked to a critic friend at that time  “In my business, Clement is known as the critic whose reviews anyone can buy - if you’re prepared to pay high enough.” To me, in 1990, Clement, defending his enthusiasm for Yuri Grigorovich’s choreography, said “Everyone has their price.” (I replied “Speak for yourself.”) Sometimes that price was simply friendship: once Clement had befriended an artist he had admired in print (I met Russian and Western ballerinas in his Islington house), he was seldom going to admit she or he was in decline.

Inevitably, Clement Crisp Reviews has its omissions. I remember long periods when Crisp spoke of Balanchine’s Divertimento no 15 as the ultimate in dance sublimity and of the ballerina Kyra Nichols as the world’s most transcendent exemplar of classicism. Neither is in these pages.

Another omission is more baffling. As I have already indicated, he always spoke to me, and wrote, of Irina Kolpakova’s 1961 Aurora (Kirov) as the greatest revelation of classicism of his life. Yet not only is she absent from these pages, but a 1961 essay on the Kirov’s first London season pointedly says that the roles of Aurora and Giselle “have been presented more blandly than we are accustomed to, and at first it seems as if ‘acting’ has been forgotten.” The two Kirov ballerinas he names in 1961 are Inna Subkovskaya (Zubkovskaya) and Alla Osipenko, because they are striking interpreters of their roles (Odette-Odile, the Lilac Fairy). We can deduce that the unnamed Kolpakova exemplified the “reserved” Kirov manner “which places every characterization by a Kirov dancer within the dancing rather than superimposed on it”^[22] – but we can also deduce that it was only later that Crisp retrospectively decided that Kolpakova had been the revelation he later liked to recall.

XII.

All of us have our self-contradictions, but Clement’s were - and remain - unusually pronounced. He had a deep streak of wickedness within him that was essential to his humour; and a powerful sense of the absurd. In 1982, I encouraged him to see the new movie Mommie Dearest, with Faye Dunaway superb as Joan Crawford. On the ‘phone, Clement’s reply was all in a single breath:

“I won’t see it, I refuse to see it, I adore Joan Crawford, I model myself on Joan Crawford; when I’m in doubt, I think ‘Now, what would Joan have done?’”

As I go through his correspondence, it abounds in remarks that, though hilarious to me, would be found actionable and/or hurtful to others. I therefore quote a text where the joke was on me.

In 1987, I applied for a teaching job at the dance division of Roehampton Institute. I knew that I was most unlikely to succeed, since Roehampton already had an impressive person on its staff who was well qualified; but I did what I could, notably by asking three of the most eminent dance critics to write testimonials for me – Mary Clarke, Arlene Croce, Clement Crisp. In due course, Crisp handed me an envelope, with the words “I think you should see what I’ve written about you for Roehampton.” I quote only part of it here:

“ALASTAIR MACAULAY

“TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN 

“I think it admirable of any institution of learning to consider taking on this unfortunate young person as a member of staff. My knowledge of him goes back a good thirty years, when he was a member of my Brownie troupe in Buenos Aires and went under the name of Martine Bormann. Since then, a series of skilful operations has made him into the man he is, or claims to be. I do not think this is the place to make mention of his kleptomania, since I gather that, due to medication, he has this problem well under control…”

And so on for three more uproarious paragraphs. (“His willingness to profit from  the generosity of visiting ballet companies is a byword in the Critics’ Circle…”)

It’s not enough to say that the author of this and many other gems is greatly missed. Clement Crisp was sui generis and life-enhancing. We were fortunate to have him among us for so many years. May he be quoted as long as dance and humour remain on earth.

^[1] Clement Crisp Reviews; Sixty Years of Dance, p.21.

^[2] Information from Sophie Constanti, who served on the Standard dance panel in the 1990s.

^[3] Information from Bill Poole, one of Crisp’s oldest friends and his longterm assistant librarian at the Royal Academy of Dancing (as it then was).  

^[4] In 1991, Arlene Croce, writing in The New Yorker about the disappearance of classical style from several international ballet companies, remarked “The Royal Ballet was lucky. When it stopped being a classical company, MacMillan gave it something else to believe in.”

^[5] Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp, The History of Dance, Orbis Books, U.K., p.4.

^[6] Among the Telegraph’s dance writers, Crisp reserved respect for Kathrine Sorley Walker alone. He observed that Fernau Hall was an anagram for Half Unreal.

^[7] Clement almost always spoke as if you were wrong if your opinions differed from his. Clarke, by contrast, sometimes drew attention in The Dancing Times to how critics differed on individual productions and companies. When Pilobolus first appeared at Sadler’s Wells in 1978, her DT review discussed how she and Alexander Bland (The Observer) had been excited, finding a whole new genre, but how Clement and John Percival (The Times) had taken strongly against it.

^[8] Clarke, Crisp, Ballet, an illustrated History, A. & C. Black, 1973, p 24.

^[9] Clement Crisp Reviews, p..283.

^[10] Ibid, p.275, about Ohad Naharin’s Sabotage Baby for Batsheva Dance Troupe.

^[11] Ibid, p.172.

^[12] This point was drawn to my attention by Zoë Anderson from her own experience. I recognised at once that Crisp had often practiced this method on me, too.

^[13] Ibid, p.78.

^[14] bid, pp.254-255.

^[15] Ibid, pp.256-257.

^[16] In the case of The Prince of the Pagodas (1989), MacMillan – anxious – revoked that permission, as Clement told me.

^[17] Ibid, p. 240.

^[18] Ibid, p.241.

^[19] Clement Crisp Reviews, p. 140.

^[20] Ibid, p.123.

^[21] Ibid, P. 96.

^[22] Clement Crisp Reviews, p. 42.