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The choreographer found out at 6 AM, scrolling through her phone like everyone else. The New York Times review was already circulating in the dance company group chat—someone had the nerve to send it before she'd even seen it herself. That's how these things work now: your worst professional moment arrives as a push notification, complete with the knife emoji reactions from people you haven't spoken to in years.
This is the reality of being a choreographer in 2024. Your most vulnerable work gets translated into a take, packaged for readers who may never have set foot in a rehearsal studio. And when the review is unkind—really unkind—the damage compounds in real-time. There's no waiting room between creation and critique.
The NYT critic's assessment of the piece was, to put it charitably, brutal. Words like "pretentious" and "self-indulgent" appeared in print, attached to months of the choreographer's life. But here's what the coverage barely acknowledged: that review wasn't hitting a monolith. It was hitting a person who had, during the creative process, experienced two losses in her family, who'd rebuilt the piece's emotional core around that grief, and who assumed any serious critic would at least sense that weight.
The dance world erupted. Not in the way industry conflicts usually play out—polite letters of support, carefully worded statements from artistic directors—but raw. Former collaborators called out the critic on social media. Dancers who performed the piece wrote about what it meant to them, offstage and unfiltered. The choreographers' collective put out a response that didn't read like a press release but like a group of people who'd been waiting years to say something.
What struck me most was the performative dimension. This wasn't just about one review—it was about who gets to declare what dance means. Critics hold enormous, often unexamined power. They shape funding decisions, grant committees take notice, and a scathing review can quietly seal the fate of a work that's already struggled for resources. The choreographer in question had jumped through more administrative hoops to get this piece staged than most audiences will ever know. One person's assessment can, in certain institutional ecosystems, become the final word.
But let's be honest about the other side, too. Not every pushback against criticism is valid, and not every artist deserves protection from tough analysis. Some of the responses to this review were genuinely thoughtful—the pointing out that the critic didn't seem to understand the choreographic tradition the piece was extending, or that the review treated contemporary movement as if it needed to apologize for existing. But other reactions were textbook defensiveness: the instant assumption that any negative assessment must stem from bias, incomprehension, or malice.
What gets lost in these conflicts is the actual conversation about the work. Both sides retreated to their corners. The choreographer stopped engaging publicly—which was arguably wise, given the pile-on dynamics of discourse online. The critic, for their part, didn't respond to the backlash, which only fueled perceptions of arrogance. Nobody learned anything from anyone. We just got two monologues masquerading as a dialogue.
Here's where empathy becomes practical, not sentimental. Critics aren't the enemy, but they do need to recognize that their words land in specific bodies, specific careers, specific financial realities. Artists, meanwhile, can't demand to be exempt from analysis—that's not how culture moves forward. What we need are venues where these conversations can happen without the threat of professional annihilation on either side. What we need are critics who approach movement with the same rigor they'd bring to text, and artists who can hear that rigor without hearing rejection.
The choreographer whose work started this mess? She's choreographing again. Of course she is. That's what artists do. But she's been quieter about the process, more protective of the early stages. The controversy didn't destroy her—it just reminded her that the world she's trying to build, one movement at a time, is a world with windows she doesn't control.
Dance survives. The critics, arguably, need to earn their place in its future.
