Writing Initiatives

Criticism as an Act of Continuation

Performance criticism is hardly new. From Greece to India, thinkers like Aristotle and Bharata were deeply interested in why some performances moved audiences while others did not. Yet, the very words critic and criticism derive from the Greek kritikos, meaning “able to discern” or “able to judge.” It is perhaps no surprise then, that for centuries the critic’s role was understood as one of evaluation. As print and later digital media expanded, the review became the default mode of criticism: a place to pronounce success or failure and shape public opinion.

By the 1960s, however, that way of thinking began to shift. In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argued that critics had become too busy explaining art instead of experiencing it. Rather than asking only what a performance means, she encouraged us to pay attention to how it catches us off guard and changes the way we see, hear and feel. Since then, many writers have imagined criticism differently not as a verdict but as a form of attention. This is where I find myself drawn to Matthew Goulish and Jane Rendell.

In Small Acts of Repair, Goulish writes about what he calls “miraculous moments”: unexpected instants of a performance that stay with us long after the curtain call. Instead of asking whether a work is good or bad, he asks us to notice what continues to resonate, what keeps unfolding in our minds, and what new questions it leaves behind. Those lingering moments can become the starting point for entirely new acts of creation. In that sense, criticism does not close a conversation; it keeps it alive.

Rendell arrives at the similar place from a different direction. In Site-Writing, she argues that writing about art can never be completely objective because the writer is always part of the encounter. Rather than pretending to stand outside the work, she proposes “writing alongside” it by allowing memories, emotions and lived experience to become part of the critical response. Criticism, then, becomes about entering into a relationship with a work and seeing where that relationship might lead.

I found these ideas both generous and liberating. What would happen if, instead of looking for flaws, I paid attention to what stayed with me? What if I allowed a performance to linger and followed wherever it led? I wanted to see what would happen if I put that into practice.

An Encounter, a Creative Response

Last year, as part of Soho Theatre Walthamstow’s launch season, I watched Bog Witch, a solo performance by British performance artist Bryony Kimmings. Blending comedy, storytelling and performance art, the show draws on Kimmings’ move from urban life to the countryside as it explores consumerism, ecological crisis and our relationship with the natural world.

It was hilarious and rich in inventive image-making. Yet what stayed with me was something else entirely: the cackling witch who appeared in a flash of light at the beginning of the performance, only to re-emerge later in abstract images that I remember as evoking a witch being burned at the stake. Or perhaps that is simply how my memory chose to hold on to it.

In Orange Dogs and Memory Responses, Katja Hilevaara reminds us that memory is imaginative as much as it is archival. We do not replay performances exactly as they happened; we reconstruct them through subjective recollection, and what we remember can be as significant as what actually unfolded on stage.

The witch became that kind of memory for me. Not just the figure Kimmings created, but one my own imagination continued to shape: an unruly feminine presence existing outside conventional expectations of age, beauty and decorum. It lingered somewhere between performance and recollection, refusing to leave.