Critics and their expectations.

In that lively magazine The New Yorker its ever-adventurous dance critic, Arlene Croce, has recently struck a shrewd blow for critical freedom. One of the burdens of being a critic--any kind of critic--is having to go to see things, hear things, or read things. We are at the beck and call of the infernal artist all the time. This is patently unfair. After all, who needs art or artists, except--as people like Ms. Croce clearly realize--as material, you might almost say fodder, for criticism?

This sad state of affairs seemed insoluble. Night after night we poor ink-stained wretches, our hands twisted by cruel computers, our minds muddled by baffling art, would tramp out to the theaters and concert halls, merely to get the raw material for our own scintillating brilliance. But then Ms. Croce hit on the solution that can relieve our pointless labors. Do away with the middleman! Don't go to the performance. It's a shattering and beautiful concept. I can't imagine why I didn't think of it myself. It's a marvelous time-saver, it leaves the critical intelligence absolutely crystal-clear of everything but blind prejudice, and it enables the lucky reader to plug directly into the critic without worrying overmuch about what is being criticized.

Ms. Croce tried out the new criticism with a long piece on Bill T. Jones at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. First she coined a useful phrase, "victim art," decided that Jones was creating a work based on his own HIV-positive status, and declared that she refused to be victimized, and was not going to attend the performances, but just write about them. No matter that the work in question was not about AIDS, but about death and bereavement, subjects of fairly general interest to artists throughout the ages. This was of no account. If you don't see something there is no need at all for your opinions to be confused by facts.

Now Ms. Croce has taken the process a step further. She criticized the recent Suzanne Farrell performances of Balanchine at Kennedy Center before these even happened. After telling us "many think" the "dauntless" Farrell should be artistic director of New York City Ballet (how many, I wonder?) she informs us that these performances are "the ballet event of the year." She doesn't say whether the year in question applies to Washington, the United States, or the civilized world. In any event, her mind seems made up.

Luckily, even critics can live and learn--who knows, one day there may even be hope for politicians--and, as an example, I must admit that I appreciated Compagnie Maguy Marin, recently in New York City at the Joyce Theater, more this time around than I curmudgeonly expected to. This was Marin's third visit to New York, and in the past her work, highly regarded by most of my colleagues both here and in Europe, had left me not so much nonplussed as unplussed,

Here is the admittedly rather simplistic critical lesson. I think I must have been looking for the wrong things--I was thinking of her primarily as a choreographer, a weaver of steps, a spinner of dances. Wrong. Marin can really be more profitably considered a woman of the theater, a creator of theatrical objets d'art, a purveyor of living statuary loosely inspired by literary notions. Not necessarily better than my earlier expectations, but different. During her New York season her company of fourteen dancers presented May B, already seen in New York in 1986, and the New York premiere of one of Marin's latest works, created at the end of 1993, Waterzooi.

May B is the less interesting of the two, although it still provides a perfectly adequate introduction to Marin's methods of mood and madness. Her choreography is a mass of subtly orchestrated unison movement, and her company has developed an uncanny ability almost to move, even breathe, as one cohesive body. "The piece," Marin tells us in a program note, "is based upon the writings of Samuel Beckett, whose work contradicts in its theatrical movement and atmosphere the physical and aesthetic performance of the dancer." More claptrap follows, and it was partly this misleading aesthetic doublespeak that so much put me off it nine years ago.

May B--a pun, vaguely Beckettian, on maybe, perhaps, or peut-etre--has nothing particularly to do with Beckett. Its use of Schubert music (bits from Winterreise and "Death and the Maiden," for example) is wildly inapposite for Beckett's optimistic nihilism, and when, at last, the only two recognizable Beckett characters (Pozzo and Lucky) stumble on, the audience registers an audibly relieved sigh of recognition.

However, its shambling, fumbling dancers, in their beautifully shabby tramp-like clothes (designed by Louise Marin) and with their gray-putty faces, wandering on and off the stage like lost souls looking. for the very extinction they fear, do suggest a worldview to which Beckett could subscribe. This is work that has the courage of its pretensions, and the measure of its aspirations.

It is serious, worthwhile stuff, as indeed is Waterzooi, the season's other full-evening work. The title here refers to that classic Belgian soup that contains everything but the kitchen sink, and it is an exploration of the moods and humors desultorily inspired by Descartes's descriptions of the human condition. It was funny, theatrical, and although it went on a bit, and contained more simple acrobatics than dancing, it did have its wit and charm, and was brilliantly performed by Marin's wondrously homogeneous (almost homogenized) ensemble.

My point here is that if you go to Marin, as I originally went to Marin, looking for any particular choreographic originality, or even invention, you are not going to find it. On the other hand, if you concentrate purely on her theatricality--to some extent forget even that it's dance, think of it as nameless drama that at times, particularly in May B, is moving toward the abstract--then I think it is possible to see Marin in a fairer light. Now this is a mea culpa, which is Latin for cop-out, on my part, but for me this experience did demonstrate very clearly the danger of prior expectation.

Whether as a critic, or as a member of the audience, which in many important factors is much the same thing, try to approach performances with as few advance expectations, whatever their nature or source, as possible. Which brings me back full circle. After all, if you are going to a performance convinced, even before you see it, that "it's the ballet event of the year," while you are not likely to be disappointed, neither are you likely to be either illuminated or, if a critic, illuminating.

Clive Barnes is a senior editor of Dance Magazine.