The three Cs: creator, curator and critic. How do these roles relate and interact with each other? Is the fact that so many performance artists and theatre-makers are also curators (of projects, festivals, events) a uniquely contemporary phenomenon? If the roles of theatre-maker and critic cross over does that diminish or enhance each role? Is there an argument for the critic maintaining distance, a step away from the making and doing of creating theatre or art work? These questions are an ongoing interest and concern for me – perhaps because I am (or have been) all three simultaneously, and indeed often wear many other additional hats simultaneously (dramaturg, choreographer, teacher – and as is often the way in live performance, absolutely any job that is needed done on show day).

And of course Total Theatre was founded by artists, and exists to give a voice to artists – so most of our contributors and reviewers are themselves primarily theatre-makers or performance artists, and we have an ongoing interest in promoting the idea that the creator can be a critic, and the critic a creator. And indeed that both or either can curate – in the fields of practice that Total Theatre focuses on, such as experimental theatre, live art and streets arts, it is common practice for artists to take responsibility for presenting their own and other artists’ work.

So it seemed logical to develop my interest in these questions into an informal lecture, which I’ve been taking to various people and places around the world. I’m always intrigued by the difference in response from place to place – but almost universal is the cry that ‘we really need something like Total Theatre here!’

Most recently, I had the pleasure of travelling to Italy to visit the Tenuta dello Scompiglio, an extraordinary arts centre cum organic farm and vineyard that is the ongoing project, passion – obsession, even – of artist and theatre-maker, Feldenkrais teacher, and curator extraordinaire Cecilia Bertoni. The purpose of the visit was to deliver the above lecture and to run workshops with a group of young Italian art critics, gathered together to explore notions of cross-artform practice (‘transversality’ seems to be the current preferred term). My time spent at Scompiglio also gave me the opportunity to see (in the first week of the residency) the same works that the young critics were seeing and writing about: which included a concert that was part of an ongoing celebration of the centenary of John Cage; and a landscape art commission called Portals, which awarded three prizes for landscape art, and commissioned a quartet of performance artists (including the UK’s Yael Karavan) to create an intervention / response to these three works and an animation of the journey through the site.

The group were a mixed bunch, although there seemed to be something of a swing towards graduates in Art History – some were practising artists as well as critics, and some were curators, but many had lived exclusively in the world of research and critique. The groups had all seen a number of artworks together – the afore-mentioned John Cage concert in the nearby city of Lucca, and the inauguration of Portals on-site at Scompiglio – and our first formal meeting was an opportunity to discuss the works seen – and indeed to talk about the pitfalls of critiquing work.

Naturally enough, most of the common critical concerns and pitfalls emerged throughout the conversation itself! These pitfalls included the tendency for a group of critics to start to have one collective opinion (on some aspects of a work, anyway) – the hotel bar drink after the show syndrome, we could call it! Then there is the danger of previous knowledge: if you know what the artist’s intention is, what you ‘should’ be witnessing, that will affect your response: most of the group were surprised to learn that I don’t read programme notes before seeing work to review – preferring to experience the work with an innocent eye first. I also noted (and commented on) a tendency for critics to respond to a non-existent artwork or show that the critic thought ‘ought’ to have been, rather than what was actually presented!

We also discussed the importance of accepting, as the absolute base starting point, the artist’s chosen artform or mode of practice. This might seem obvious enough, but believe me, I once read a review (by a critic on a national newspaper no less) who queried why a puppet-theatre company chose to use puppets rather than actors…

Other interesting issues that arose in discussion included: the ways in which an audience changes a live event from one day to the next; the way audiences respond differently to an indoor, seated environment (such as a music concert) versus an outdoor promenade performance (such as the commissioned live ‘interventions’ and performances placed alongside the Portals commissioned work); whether it helps if a critic interviews or shadows an artist before seeing the finished work; and if the work being presented is not original but an interpretation (as in the case of the Cage work), if the interpreters ought to remain true to the artist’s intention in its staging.

On another day, after the Three Cs lecture presentation, the discussion focused more on the nitty-gritty of reviewing, with the discussion including a reflection on the need to open the heart and feel what is being presented as well as thinking about it; the importance of being a good witness rather than just a conveyor of opinion; and the need to overcome the fear of ‘not understanding’ – particularly in cross-artform or ‘tranversal’ work, as we will all as critics be more informed and knowledgeable on one aspect of the work than on another. And yes, whilst we can all – whatever age – continue to amass knowledge and experience on as many artists and as many aspects of art-making as possible, we will none of us ever know everything.

Ultimately, my advice to these bright and shining young Italian critics was that if they were always willing to learn, always open to new knowledge and experience, and always ready to admit publicly to their strengths and weaknesses, their areas of expertise and areas of less experience – and to remember that it is fine to say ‘I don’t know’ – then they’d do alright!

Just to bring home the importance of constantly learning, and constantly shaking up what we know and how we work, we spent the next day on the use of creative writing techniques as a tool for critics – with the outcome some very lovely pieces of writing  (fiction, poetry, criticism, and some things that were hard to define!) And that came after a morning of energetic theatre games, on the grounds that if you shake up the body, you shake up the mind…

Dorothy Max Prior presented her lecture The Three Cs: Creator, Curator, Critic and her workshop The Creative Response at Trasversalita della Critica, held at the Tenuta dello Scompiglio (which very loosely translates as the Retreat of the Trickster) 14–28 September 2012. The indoor spaces at Scompiglio, theatre and art galleries – will be inaugurated on 27 October 2012.

Contact Dorothy Max Prior at: max@totaltheatre.org.uk

For more about Scompiglio see http://www.delloscompiglio.org/