- Do you want to have better conversations about art?
- Are you in a position to critique someone else’s work?
- Are you seeking a way to get useful feedback on your own work?
- Have you felt dissatisfied or alienated by your past experiences with critique?
- Are you an artist, administrator, teacher, parent, partner, or person-in-general seeking better ways to have a dialogue?
Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process is a widely-recognized method that nurtures the development of artistic works-in-progress through a four-step, facilitated dialogue between artists, peers, and audiences.
About the Critical Response Process
Developed almost 15 years ago, the Process has been embraced by artmakers, educators, and administrators at theater companies, dance departments, orchestras, museums and more. The Process has deepened dialogue between artists and audiences; it has enhanced learning between teachers and students. By extension it has proven valuable for all kinds of creative endeavors, work situations, and collaborative relationships, from kindergartens to corporations.
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange is pleased to offer a variety of formats for learning, facilitation, and consultation in the Critical Response Process.
“In wide use for over 15 years, the Critical Response Process was developed by Liz Lerman, choreographer and founder of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Long a leader in the arts field, Liz is the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 Macarthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship. The Process is rooted in Liz’s in-the-trenches experience as an artist, teacher, leader, collaborator, and colleague. About its origins, Liz writes: “I was well-established as an artist before I finally acknowledged how uncomfortable I was about most aspects of criticism. Feedback sessions often seemed brutal and not very helpful. Responding in a ‘mature’ way to criticism meant quietly taking it, since to respond at all was somehow deemed either defensive or a violation of an unspoken boundary. In backstage conversations after performances, I had trouble getting what I needed and trouble knowing what other artists wanted.
“It was clear that as a field, we needed to expose the previously unspoken values in criticism. We needed to find a way to have a dialogue about work that could strengthen the artist’s own ability to solve the problems inherent in creative endeavors.
“I began evolving the Critical Response Process based on a few discoveries: The more I made public my own questions about my work, the more willing I was to hear other people’s reactions to it. If I could just talk – and listen to myself – in a mutually-invested conversation, I would hear new information and unexpected ways out of artistic dilemmas. And when giving feedback, by gently pursuing the right questions with students and colleagues, I found could raise all of my concerns and, amazingly, encounter no defensive resistance.”
A Roadmap for Meaningful Dialogue
Building on these discoveries, Liz Lerman formulated a four-step method for facilitated group feedback which - unlike some models of critique - affords the artist an active role in the dialogue.
The process engages participants in 3 roles:
- The artist offers a work-in-progress for review and feels prepared to question that work in a dialogue with other people.
- The responders, committed to the artist’s intent to make excellent work, offer reactions to the work in a dialogue with the artist.
- The facilitator initiates each step, keeps the process on track, and works to help the artist and responders use the Process to frame useful questions and responses.
The Critical Response Process takes place after a presentation of artistic work. Work can be short or long, large or small, and at any stage in its development. The facilitator then leads the artist and responders through 4 steps:
- Statements of Meaning: Responders state what was meaningful, evocative, interesting, exciting, striking in the work they have just witnessed.
- Artist as Questioner: The artist asks questions about the work. After each question, the responders answer. Responders may express opinions if they are in direct response to the question asked and do not contain suggestions for changes.
- Neutral Questions: Responders ask neutral questions about the work. The artist responds. Questions are neutral when they do not have an opinion couched in them. For example, if you are discussing the lighting of a scene, “Why was it so dark?” is not a neutral question. “What ideas guided your choices about lighting?” is.
- Opinion Time: Responders state opinions, subject to permission from the artist. The usual form is “I have an opinion about ______, would you like to hear it?” The artist has the option to decline opinions for any reason.
Learning Formats
The Critical Response Process is both simple in its outlines and richly nuanced in its applications and outcomes. To help users get the most out of this methodology, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange offers a range of resources reflecting years of best practice as the source institution of Critical Response.
About the Critical Response Process
