Gedeelde grond (‘Shared ground’) is a series of conversations with arts professionals from Flanders. What do they dream about? What do they worry about? In this first episode of season two, we talk to Pieter T’Jonck and Wouter Hillaert – founder and coordinator of Pzazz. As an online platform for performing arts reviews, they talk more about what makes a good review and reviewer for them, and daring to write if you didn’t like something.
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Listen to the podcast (in Dutch) or read the summary below.
Through online reviews, Pzazz shows what is happening on professional stages: from classical (youth) theatre to opera, ballet and circus. These reviews target not only stage lovers and professionals, but also potential audiences who do not know where to start.
“What you’ve seen over the last 15 to 20 years is that the mainstream media pay less and less attention to what happens on stages,” says founder Pieter T’Jonck. “You can really mark that down, year after year that goes backwards. On the other hand, you did have a huge flowering of a kind of academic discourse. There are also some journals that go very deep into specific developments or often historical pieces. In between, there is a large audience in Flanders that actually no longer gets any feedback in the media on what is happening in the performing arts, and on whether this is something for them now.”
The limited number of reviews of the arts is partly due to underfunding. It is not easy to pay or engage people on a long-term basis. Pzazz does not escape these financial circumstances either. Moreover, according to coordinator Wouter Hillaert, there is an undervaluation of the profession of ‘art critic’ that you can’t just turn around. “It is rather made for people who combine a permanent job with a kind of hobby-writing. To make that very concrete: I wrote for 15 years for €80 gross per review at De Morgen and De Standaard. That was until 2018. Today, I think it has almost doubled at De Standaard. So there is a different regime, but it is still glorified volunteering.”
The support Pzazz now receives, including through organisations in the sector itself, allows them to review around 20 pieces a month. The organisation’s target is higher: “Our ambition is to review everything that appears, that feedback can make a big difference to many creators.”
But what constitutes a quality review? According to Pieter, it is mostly about clear and good language. Giving people an idea of what happens on stage, and what it looks like. “How does it compare with, say, what usually happens in the KVS, or in NTGent? How does one address the audience? How do you come in? Is this Shakespeare to the letter or is it some messed-up adaptation of it? So what the creators use, and how they use it. You interpret that, and try to contrast it with other things. Which immediately means that the reviewer actually has to have seen and read a lot to be able to determine of yes, what does this actually represent?”
“We also really have to leave something to the reader themselves when they become viewers. So description is one function and next to that you have interpretation, analysis and judgement. If those four together are equally important in a review, then I’m happy with what I’ve read. And if you learn something from it or, yes, suddenly start to see something differently, then it has proved its function,” Wouter adds.
When you look for pens and voices with a certain maturity and knowledge, you quickly risk falling into a certain canonical thinking or established framework. Combined with the financial realities, the search for polyphony is not an unfamiliar issue for Pzazz either. “If you look at the field it colours very white. The critics are indeed not that diverse, they are in age I think,” Wouter explains, “and certainly in gender. But when it comes to different cultural frameworks from which you interpret something or experiences that play into how that something comes in, there is still a lot of work to be done there.”
Pzazz therefore organises about four to six workshops a year. Through an open call, they meet in Antwerp and Brussels with a group of people without mountains of viewing experience, with whom they go to about five performances and talk and reflect on them together. “Writing was not even the intention in the first place. And what you notice that is very difficult is just already having the right to think something about something. I’m going to see something and apparently that’s considered important, but I don’t really understand why and do I have the right to …. That’s a kind of haze that hangs around our field and our practice that says to some people: yes, it’s not quite for you. Breaking that is already the beginning of the work.”
“You just see that the field is diversifying, and the frequency where you now come into a performance where you feel that the cultural background is different from the one you grew up in, that frequency is really increasing. And I feel like we as critics are not really well prepared for that. And that was the main reason I think for us to go into that. We feel there’s something missing about the skills you need anyway.”
As usual, this episode of Gedeelde grond also closes with a look to the future: the dream and nightmare scenario about our arts. Pzazz hopes above all that the arts survive, and do not lose their social impact.
Gedeelde grond (Shared ground) is a new series of conversations with arts professionals from Flanders. What do they dream about? What do they worry about? Find out more about the themes that are alive in the arts field.
