COVID’s Small Mercies
By Elizabeth Zimmer
Essay from Plague Take It, a collection of essays inspired by the pandemic,
published by Loose Cannon Press in 2021
For close to 50 years, I earned a good chunk of my living going to the theater and writing about what I found there. I’ve reviewed dance, theater, film, and all sorts of experimental performance, for radio, magazines, and newspapers on both coasts of Canada and the United States. In 1992, I returned to Manhattan, where I was born. While friends and relatives eased into retirement, playing golf and hosting grandchildren, I soldiered on, tracking press releases, making reservations, and working a double shift: writing all day at my computer, with a dinner break and then a stint sitting still and watching other people move, or talk, or commit all sorts of atrocities on the big screen. And taking notes, and heading home to sit some more and meet a deadline. Sometimes I was so tired I’d fall asleep in my chair.
But a year ago everything suddenly froze. Broadway shut down. Dance companies cancelled their seasons. Movie theaters, gyms, restaurants... all shuttered. The senior center where I spent a couple of hours a week lying on the floor, doing the odd combination of exercises and resting that make up the Feldenkrais Method, closed its doors. Doctors cancelled appointments. My trainer, my housekeeper, my massage therapist, even my physical therapist stopped showing up. Many of us who live alone mourned the absence of human contact, of human touch.
For a lot of people, the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns came as a shock, a psychic blow cushioned by generous unemployment benefits. They had cash flow, but no place to go, nowhere to spend their sudden windfall. A stage-manager neighbor pivoted to making masks on his sewing machine and giving them away. College teachers, shut out of their lecture halls, realized they could operate from anywhere; one friend left our Chelsea building for Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, where she’s been teaching remotely over Zoom and helping her mother settle into a new house. Another, flummoxed by con-struction noise in his uptown apartment and lousy WiFi at his husband’s country digs, took his laptop to an upstate city where he keeps his newly widowed mother-in-law company, writing his dissertation and teaching from her home and garden.
I, on the other hand, was merely bemused, and startled by how frightened everyone around me seemed. I live in an apartment complex full of senior citizens who’d dart away, terrified, when anyone approached them. People let their newspaper and mail deliveries sit for days before daring to touch them, and swabbed down their groceries. My work as a standardized patient, pretending to be ill so medical students could practice their inter- personal skills, shifted fitfully to Zoom and then quieted down for the Summer. I wrote about dances on video, filmed in quarantine, until my editor and I couldn’t stand it anymore.
But I’m an old hand at this kind of isolation. Laid off from a full-time job in 2006, I’ve spent years working freelance from home. In the past decade I’ve undergone three orthopedic surgeries. Confined to this apartment for weeks on end, I got used to going nowhere, with only public radio for company. My idea of a vacation is not having to go to the theater! Being forbidden to walk in the street without a mask prevented me from eating the fattening snacks that delight me about urban life—never mind that the bakeries had closed. I immediately lost 10 pounds. A large cohort of Facebook friends replaced the lobby conversations I’d been missing, and were easier to deal with, given the progressive hearing loss that haunts me, compounded by the difficulty of understanding people through their masks.
Will Friedwald, a music writer with a passion for jazz and popular song, moved his Clip Joint, a compilation of clips from old films and television variety shows spotlighting his favorite performers, onto Zoom where, thrice weekly, viewers, many of them similarly expert, can kibitz in the chat while the clips play, and wire tips via Venmo and similar services. Alcoholic beverages are optional. The Joint keeps me up late, but I’ve made new friends there, and can attend in my nightgown.
I help edit Persimmontree.org, an online quarterly magazine of the arts by and for women over 60. We’d just closed our Spring issue when the pandemic began to threaten the United States, and we sprang into action, soliciting responses to COVID from our readership. Contributions poured in: poetry, prose, drawings, clips of music and film. We published five special Corona sections between May and the election, and another responding to the events of January 6, before the presidential inauguration.
Life goes on, for those of us lucky enough to escape the virus. The Feldenkrais lessons, uniquely suited to the Zoom environment, multiply: I now take 11 classes a week, working on a mat on my living room floor, and slowly getting to know the people, in their little rectangles, in their own homes, who take them alongside me. Dancers and choreographers are making movies, often only five minutes long—the perfect length for our fractured attention spans. My voice instructor, who lives upstairs, also teaches via Zoom, with surprisingly good results. Theaters around the country are producing new shows, and repurposing old ones, for digital transmission. My senior center has been screening first-run films via Zoom; this is the first year in ages that I’ve actually seen most of the Academy Award contenders.
And Spring has come again; blossoms and bright leaves and birdsong erupt outside my window. I still hate eating alone, but I’ve come to treasure the hours of solitude this new circumstance allows me. I no longer feel it necessary to contribute an opinion to every discussion. The plague has left me time to think, to remember, and to formulate a sane way forward.
* * *
How I left academe and tried to earn a living
By Elizabeth Zimmer
published in The Society of Dance History Scholars Newsletter in 2009,
in a special issue called Dancing Economics, vol XXIX
In the United States, many believe, economic mobility is based on merit. Anything is possible; an ordinary kid, even a kid “of color,” can grow up to be president. The business of America, it’s said, is business, but the occasional brave young person escapes that trajectory to become an artist, a writer, even a choreographer or a dance scholar.
And yet, if you look closely at what actually happens, you see a startling number of people going into their parents’ professions. They take over the family business, or follow Dad into law or medicine. In the rare cases where, 50 years ago or so, Mom was in the workforce, her profession, too, affected the choices kids made.
This is a personal story, but its professional valences may resonate. My working-class parents were depression-bred; my father quit high school to help support his family by working as a clerk in a drugstore, and my mother, who graduated college in 1936, gave up her dream of medical school because she didn’t want to impose on her father’s generosity. When I was coming up, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, my dad was a salesman in a New York department store. My mother, after having three children, began teaching in the city’s public schools. I decided that I wanted to be an actress.
“Do whatever you want,” Mom said, “but get a teaching credential so you have something to fall back on.” Her own ambivalence about her teaching career was clear. “Whatever you do, don’t major in education,” she warned. I graduated from Bennington with a degree in creative writing, and accepted an assistantship at a state university that would pay my way through a Ph.D. in English. The Vietnam War was then at its height, and guys who didn’t want to go were in graduate school. After four years at a woman’s college I wanted to be where the guys were. I quickly realized that writing papers for the academic closet, papers no one except my professor would ever read, was not how I wanted to spend my life.
I married and moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where my husband taught at the local art college and I became, for all practical purposes, its English department. I wanted to write poetry—in those years poets had the status of rock stars, Sylvia Plath’s death made headlines, and the 92nd Street Y attracted fans of T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings as well as emerging modern dancers.
But the art college did not renew my husband’s contract; after his second year he was out of a job, and despite holding degrees in physics and sculpture, he never found another one. I scrambled to supplement our income, freelancing for the local alternative weekly and for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, reviewing plays, films, and, eventually, dance.
Bill Bales, who taught the freshman “Period and Style” course I took in my senior year at Bennington, had told me I was a good writer and should think about practicing dance criticism, advice I promptly forgot. But there I was, dredging up my skills, going out to watch other people move, and crafting two-minute reviews to read on the radio.
I also began lusting after dance classes. After a year in Ballet III with the nine-year-olds at a Halifax studio, I bonded with friends to start a dance cooperative where adults could actually find appropriate training. The dance co-op still functions today, and is one of my proudest accomplishments; it originated in an amazing Canadian economic stimulus program that offered young people salaries to run their own projects.
For years, when people asked me how I got into dance writing, I’d say that it paid better than lyric poetry. And for a long time, that was true. At concerts I reviewed, I sometimes made more money than the performers. I felt a little guilty about that.
I left my marriage and moved to Vancouver, B.C., a larger city with better weather and a livelier dance scene; there I studied ballet, modern, yoga and contact improvisation, and taught writing at a community college while continuing to broadcast reviews on CBC radio. These were the years of the “dance boom” in the States, and many companies toured to Seattle, some crossing the border to play Vancouver; I could train my eye and my taste thousands of miles from New York. I read every book about dance in the Vancouver Public Library; if memory serves there were about 80 of them in 1975.
When I returned to New York in 1978, I discovered that public radio here didn’t pay for dance reviews. Luckily I had friends, writers I’d met through my membership in the Dance Critics Association, who helped me find freelance work at the city’s alternative papers. I volunteered as a critic at WBAI, a listener-sponsored radio station, and wrote assessments of dance performances for the New York State Council on the Arts, something I still do 30 years later. Editors who heard me on the radio offered assignments at Dance Magazine and The Village Voice. I took jobs in arts management and arts-in-education, which provided office space and enough income to support my writing career.
In 1986 I was offered $1500 to edit a book, published three years later as Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. I ran the Bates Dance Festival for two summers, mainly as a way to get out of the city in the hot months. In 1988 I hired on as a dance critic at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a Hearst daily. I moved to California and threw myself into covering dance in a sprawling metropolis whose major economic and creative focus was film.
Thirteen months later the paper folded, an opening salvo in the disintegration of print media across the country. Friends in the dance departments of local schools immediately offered me work. Never having studied dance history, I found myself teaching Dance 7, the service course at the University of California at Riverside, driving 65 miles each way twice a week. Later I taught “Writing for the Arts,” a class I devised for arts majors in many disciplines, at Loyola Marymount University, slightly closer to home. And once more I donated my services to public radio, driving an hour each way to broadcast on KCRW in Santa Monica. I researched Los Angeles dance archives for the National Endowment for the Arts, earned a pittance managing an epochal conference for the Dance Critics Association in conjunction with the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, flew all over the country as a “site visitor” for the NEA, and visited New Delhi and Havana on other people’s money.
Just as my health insurance ran out, I was hired at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, where my title, which did not fit on my business card, was “Director of Development, Marketing, Membership, Education, and Public Relations.” It was a three-quarter-time position, and I shared an office and a computer with the bookkeeper and the office manager. In the quarter-time reserved for myself I got back to ballet class and wrote regularly for the San Francisco Sentinel, a free local bar paper.
The SFPALM job lasted nine months, after which my boss announced she couldn’t afford me. Two weeks later the dance editor at The Village Voice, my dear friend Burt Supree, dropped dead. Colleagues suggested I apply for his job, a process abetted by Voice critic Deborah Jowitt, whose editor I would became for the next 14 years. I sold most of my belongings and drove back across the country.
For a while everything was fine; I managed to ratchet up the pay for the position from the $15,000 I was originally offered to something like a livable salary, covered a great range of dance, employed a number of other writers, and enjoyed the diversity of tasks involved with the job.
While at the Voice I made time to edit the text of Envisioning Dance on Film and Video, an anthology of essays and video clips, superintended by Judy Mitoma at UCLA and ultimately published by Routledge. And Jeff Weinstein, a Voice colleague who got fired and resurfaced as the fine arts editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, hired me to cover ballet in Philly, which I did for seven years.
I prepared web copy for PBS productions about Alvin Ailey and Busby Berkeley. The American College Dance Festival Association asked me to adjudicate several of its festivals. I gave speeches in Taiwan and Taormina, wrote program essays for City Center and Lincoln Center, and developed the Kamikaze Dance Writing Workshop, a hit-and-run undertaking that, in two or three days of concentrated study, shows fledgling writers how to write a 500-word dance review in 300 words, the length that has become the “new normal.” Currently I teach this workshop several times a year, on campuses all over the country.
About 10 years ago, I earned approximately the same amount of money annually as my youngest brother, a tenured professor of theater at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. (He combined his passion for theater with a teaching credential, earning an MFA and then getting plucked from a doctoral program and given the job he still has, 32 years on.) But the forces of change began to lean on the dance section of the Voice. Advertising fled to the Web. We lost a third of our space. Designers made the pages smaller, the white space and the pictures bigger. There was less room for me to earn extra cash writing. My brother’s pay kept increasing as mine began to drop.
Dance coverage survived regime changes at the Voice, but when the paper was bought by a chain based in Denver and Phoenix, we all sensed that the end was near. Sure enough, one August morning in 2006, a man I’d never seen before announced that my position and nine others had been eliminated in a general restructuring. Because I belonged to a union, I left with a hefty severance package. Deborah Jowitt kept her job, but even that has been reduced to a shadow of its former self.
I’d been contributing to Dance Magazine for more than 25 years, but rates there were going down instead of up, and the publication became increasingly staff-written. I finally told the editor I couldn’t afford to write for her any more—days before the current recession eliminated other projects I was anticipating.
Today I juggle work for a free daily newspaper that pays 25 percent less per story than it did four years ago, and offers many fewer assignments. I field requests to write for journals (like this one) that do not pay anything at all, the occasional print or web gig that does pay reasonably well, and invitations to appear on panels and lead workshops for sums ranging from zero to as much as $1000 a day. I made half the money in 2008 that I did in 2007 (when I still had severance pay), and half as much in 2009 as I made in 2008. I have no pension, and my carefully amassed retirement account took a major hit in last year’s stock-market debacle. The good news: I have time for a terrific exercise class at a local Y, taught by Naomi Goldberg, an SAB-trained dancer now specializing in “dances for a variable population” ranging in age from 28 to 78.
Two years ago I accepted an offer to lead a tour group of Australian dance fans for a week of dance viewing in New York followed by a week at the “Ballet Across America” Festival in Washington D.C., a task described to me by the tour organizer as “75 percent nanny and 25 percent ballet expert.” The 2008 version paid reasonably well. The 2009 tour was cancelled due to world economic woes, and for the 2010 trip, scheduled for next June, I’ve been offered substantially less money for the same work. I’m praying that enough people sign up.
In the back of my mind I hear my mother’s voice, at the end of her life, still suggesting that I go back to school and get my Ph.D. The master’s degree I collected in 1974 sufficed to teach in community colleges everywhere else on the continent, but in New York City the glut of scholars with doctorates—and of underemployed journalists with impeccable professional pedigrees—makes finding an interesting teaching job incredibly difficult.
As I write, in late 2009, Alastair Macaulay is the only full-time dance critic left on a daily in this country, working at The New York Times where he gets plenty of space and editorial freedom. The Times also supports three other excellent dance journalists, plus a roster of freelancers who contribute features.
The rolls of the Dance Critics Association, to which I’ve belonged for more than 30 years, shrink as long-time members lose their jobs and young writers find it increasingly difficult to get a foothold in the field. Dance journalists contribute to several websites that offer lots of space but no money and often very little editing. You can find dance reviews online if you look for them, but they’ve become increasingly rare in general interest print outlets where ordinary folks might stumble over them and be inspired to take in a performance.
The professional dance community mourns the disappearance of print media that midwived the dance boom of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Companies want attention for their work and reviews they consider essential to obtaining grant funding. Movie companies actually celebrate the eclipse of newspaper film criticism, relying on huge marketing budgets to keep their products in the public eye long enough for word-of-mouth to kick in. But the dance world lacks marketing money, and dance works rarely run long enough to exploit word-of-mouth.
What does the future hold? In a year I’ll begin collecting social security payments, and be eligible for senior rates on the local transit system. I’ll write for Ballet Review, which pays $25 a page, and for a website about death, Obitmag.com, which recently commissioned a piece on Merce Cunningham. If the newspaper in Australia to which I contribute survives, I’ll keep writing features. I’ve trained myself to stop shopping.
The dancers, bless them, will keep emerging from our schools and scrambling for gigs, paying or not, with new and established choreographers. Television will corrupt the taste of those who come to the form by way of So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars, and maybe dance companies can figure out a way to lure fans of those shows into their theaters.
I have become, after a fashion, a “public intellectual,” commanding, in print and on the Internet, an audience much larger than I ever dreamed of. And now I actually have the leisure—because of my mother’s very frugal habits, and the small bequest she left me—to write poetry, to figure out what I, uniquely, have to say and how to say it. But dance writing, I fear, may be returning to the closet, losing its place in mass media.
* * *
Anatomy of Melancholy: A Veteran Dance Writer Surveys the Scene
By Elizabeth Zimmer
(Reprint from Movement Research Performance Journal #30).
As I write it is late August, 2006. I have just been laid off from my 14-year stint as dance editor at The Village Voice. The 675 words of space for dance writing available weekly in the Voice is enough, for this moment, to cover a single major event.
There's no space at all to deal with dance events at the American Living Room Project, at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, at the various site-specific festivals that abound this time of year. We didn't cover dance at the New York International Fringe Festival, Galapagos, the new Ailey studio, various places in the Bronx and Queens, on Fire Island, or the new Spiegeltent at the South Street Seaport. A few things at Jacob's Pillow will catch Deborah Jowitt's attention, but that's because she can't resist checking them out even during her vacation. She has a summer place nearby; she also has a salary at the Voice and gets the same money no matter how many concerts she reviews; lucky for the dance community that she has a strong sense of duty and a hunger for the new. The Voice's website accepts anything she wants to write, but won't let anyone write for nothing and won't pay for additional dance writing.
Arts criticism is in trouble in print media across the country, and invisible on television and radio. It's burgeoning on the web, though generally in situations where remuneration is tiny or non-existent. I've been contributing to one of the city's free dailies (its arts editor is a former intern of mine; who says there's no such thing as karma?), but it will only accept reviews of shows that continue to run, which leaves out 90 percent of the city's dance presentations. And I sometimes get work writing feature stories—interviews, for the most part—for an Australian daily, about dance artists scheduled to appear Down Under. But the newspaper from which I drew an editorial salary for 14 years regularly rejected most pitches from me, and other writers, for longer stories on dance subjects, and has over the past 15 years reduced our space from about 2400 words a week to the aforementioned 675. It eliminated our annual dance supplement, after shrinking it, over the past two decades, from 12 pages to two. I had to lay off all the other writers who've been contributing to the section.
"How many people in the city do you think are really interested in dance, Elizabeth?" my former boss frequently asked me. Every time I answered him I inflated the number by another 10,000, but you could tell this sports nut was skeptical. He once told me to avoid using the word "choreographer" in dance stories, as he didn't think people understood it. He left his position, but the new owners of the paper did not come through with more space or resources for dance. I got half a page a week for listings, and the designers enlarged the type face, which meant I could run about 10 percent fewer listings than before; when the season's busy the space does not increase, and if people actually buy advertising they sometimes slap the ads into the dance listings columns, necessitating further cuts. I spent my time at the paper recycling my listings onto the website, editing sex writers and our astrologer, going to see concerts that for the most part bewildered me, and working with Deborah on a kind of triage: figuring out what single item, out of the diverse bouquet of 30 or so events available to us every week, we wanted to feature on the dance page.
Things are better at The New York Times, where two staff writers and a rotation of capable freelancers give dance a lot of attention in six issues a week and online. But when those staff writers, both of whom are past 60, retire, it's unlikely that their positions will be filled. Dance writing will become what it's been for most people in the field for decades: an avocation, something you do for love and mad money, not for a salary. Over the past three decades, not only have fees for dance writing not increased; in many places, relative to inflation, they've actually been reduced.
Where does that leave the dance profession itself? Who are contemporary choreographers trying to reach? What are they trying to share with audiences?
One thing the downtown community, in fact, any "lively arts" community--needs to face is the fact that it's in the entertainment business. It's competing with books, feature films, cable television, video games, glossy magazines, and the Internet for consumers' time, money, and attention, not to mention the gym, fine wine, and destination restaurants. Some members of what used to be the dance audience actually have children. People who've recently invested in cell phones, premium cable, and DSL may be less inclined to leave home of an evening to sit through sketchy performances by people they've never heard of. People over 40, increasingly the only ones who can afford to live in Manhattan or nearby communities, are reluctant to sit in bad folding chairs, or to take off their shoes in a loft studio. People under 30, infatuated with reality TV, may be unwilling to subject themselves to the sometimes taxing thought processes that go along with deciphering new dance. Everyone is accustomed to multitasking, and less willing to sit in the dark and concentrate on something complicated; check out the number of cell phone screens visible in the average darkened dance theater. And friends and family only go so far, and so frequently, toward filling the seats for experimental work. A large portion of the dance audience seems to be other dancers and dance students. It's great that they're turning up, but everyone's future depends on enlarging the spectator base.
For decades, perhaps since the beginning of the '60s dance boom, fueled by government funding and cheap real estate, dancers and choreographers have operated in a comfortable bubble, insulated from the realities of the marketplace, the media, and show business generally. Newspapers and magazines are not, for the most part, non-profit organizations. They're structured to reward investors; they rely on selling advertising, and often subscriptions and single copies, to pay their overhead and make a profit. They want to fill their pages with editorial content that will appeal to the broadest spectrum of readers and advertisers. That's why much of the arts space in the Voice is devoted to popular music and film. Publishers want the paper filled with information people can use, and a review of a concert that played twice in a 60-seat theater, and then closed, doesn't strike them as particularly useful. Deborah and I, and dozens of other dance writers across the country, may get pleasure out of reacting to the dance art on local stages, but few publishers understand the value of including our responses in the media mix.
As dance presenters discover the utility of maintaining their own mailing lists and blitzing audiences with last-minute e-mail reminders, they invest less money in print advertising; this causes the spiral in which we're currently caught. Less advertising results in less editorial coverage. Less editorial coverage results in smaller audiences. Smaller audiences discourage funders. And people who work from their own lists are increasingly talking to themselves, not reaching out for the serendipitous reader who stumbles across an ad, a review, or a listing and decides to invest in a couple of hours of cultural adventure.
Do I sound depressed? It gets worse. After close to 35 years of covering dance on both coasts of two continents, I've basically lost my appetite for it. I can now usually tell, just by looking at a press release, whether the event in question is going to be worth my time. I've become bolder about leaving a concert at intermission; since I'm rarely writing, I'm not sacrificing anyone's bid for media immortality. I lust after time to read, sleep, do my own workout. And now, it appears, I will have that time.
The Movement Research Journal and Contact Quarterly, two crucial publications in the field, are non-profit operations. But neither is of much use to artists who want to get the word out about next week's concert, or have that concert reviewed. Free dance events, at any season, still draw substantial audiences. A break-dance competition among four female crews drew thousands of people to Lincoln Center's Plaza in the summer of 2006, and left them cheering even though the work was not all that "good" by strict aesthetic standards. But free dance events require underwriting by governments and corporations, require paying salaries to grant writers, to technicians, and, yes, to dancers.
What is to be done? Large numbers of gifted dance artists are seeking employment in universities, putting a financial floor under their work and their families, drawing on free rehearsal space and dancers with whom they can build new works. Others do what they've always done: find part-time work outside the field, double up in outer-rim apartments, rely on trust funds or other forms of family largesse. Some move abroad. Encouragingly, some, like Karole Armitage, move back.
Dance artists might figure out a way to run their shows over longer periods, as visual and theater artists do, thus increasing the likelihood that print media will find ways to cover them. They might find ways to get their work on television, where most Americans spend most of their leisure time, and on DVD, so people can find them online, in store bins, in catalogues, and can give them as gifts. They might find ways to attract the young, to build a following of people who'll mature into ticket buyers, maybe via video podcasts. They could experiment with earlier curtains, so people can come watch straight from work or school, and still get home to spend the evening with their favorite TV shows.
Beyond these I am, at the moment, stymied. I hope these words open a dialogue with the field.
© Movement Research