Alastair Macaulay is an English writer and dance critic. He was the chief dance critic for The New York Times from 2007 until he retired in 2018. [1] [2] He was previously chief dance critic at The Times and Literary Supplement and chief theater critic of the Financial Times , both of London. He founded the British quarterly Dance Theater Journal in 1983. He writes that his first morning in New York City was before September 1981. [3] In addition to his roles as critic, Macaulay has written for The New Yorker [4] and also published a biography on Margot Fonteyn. [5] In 2000, he wrote Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Dance: Conversations with Alastair Macaulay with Matthew Bourne. [6] Macaulay was named one of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts' Jerome Robbins Dance Division Fellows in 2017. [7] As of 2019, Macaulay was an instructor at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. [8]
Macaulay started a controversy in 2010 when he disparagingly commented on the weight of ballet dancer Jenifer Ringer. In a review of a performance of The Nutcracker , he wrote that Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, "looked as if she'd eaten one sugar plum too many." [9] Macaulay published a response to the controversy explaining his perspective and writing, "The body in ballet becomes a subject of the keenest observation and the most intense discussion. I am severe — but ballet, as dancers know, is more so." [10]