CLIVE BARNES (1927–2008)

Influential dance critic Clive Barnes died early Wednesday from complications of cancer, reports William Grimes in the New York Times. He was eighty-one and lived in Manhattan. Barnes helped bring dance to a broad audience with an exuberant, highly personal style. For many years, he was a theater critic for the New York Times, and then the New York Post. Until a few weeks before his death, he continued filing reviews for the Post, as he had for the past thirty years. His thirteen years as dance critic at the Times, from 1965 to 1977, coincided with a rapid expansion of the dance world and an explosion of new talent. As chief theater critic, a position he held for nearly a decade, he championed plays by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, wrote appreciatively of the young David Mamet, and embraced, initially with some reservations and later with none, the musical Hair. It was as a dance critic, however, that he made his strongest impact. “He was literate, knowledgeable, and passionate,” said Lynn Garafola, a professor of dance at Barnard College. “When it came to a challenging work, he would review not just the first performance but the second performance and third performance, and then write an analytic piece, too. He also had a remarkable visual memory. He wasn’t just seeing the ballet in front of him. He had a bank of memories that went back half a century.”