Response to “FUSION: A Review”

I am currently studying abroad, and have thoroughly enjoyed keeping up with The Voice through its web site. For the record, I think it looks great.

The beauty of the Internet is that I can also submit a letter to the editor from across the Atlantic railing against a terrible article on FUSION that was published a short while ago.

The article was written by Kimmie Braunthal and currently holds a “-17” rating on the website.

First of all, it’s very poorly written; phrases like “[it] is a night full of Asian culture, dance and overall experience,” “I know many places in the need resources for rebuilding…”, and “[a]s a performer I know things can slip up, get messy, etc. and it’s the way the dancers deal with mistakes” appear in the final draft of the article. Was this even copy-edited?

Glaring mistakes in writing are frustrating to the reader, but they pale in comparison to the offensive style of this piece.

It reads like live-blogging of the event. The experience of reading this was like perusing someone’s bad notes on a performance whilst the event is happening.

She consistently refers to aspects of the show without explaining them at all, leaving a student who was not able to see FUSION confused and uninformed, which is the exact opposite of what a piece of journalism should be.

The structure of the thing was brutal as well. She introduced the article by saying that a slideshow of decrepit classrooms in Vietnam was “kind of a downer.”

I hope CCASA issued an apology for bumming the author out! I know how difficult it can be to deal with (photographs of) conditions in third-world countries sometimes.

After this, she made a habit of mentioning a piece only to pick out one or two aspects of it to criticize, then moving on to the next one and repeating the formula.

I learned that Braunthal hoped dancers had integrated scarves into a routine, that she likes to reference Chicago and Gilmore Girls (two things I’ve never seen before, further alienating readers), that she wasn’t impressed with a Korean dance of some sort, that she could have done a better job of choreographing Pete Konowski’s part in a belly dance, that she didn’t approve of someone’s shirt color, and that some dancers looked like they did not want to be on stage, among other things.

Furthermore, the words “I”, “me”, and “my” (not to be confused with “I Me Mine” off Let It Be) appear thirty-three times in the article. I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t care what the author thought about the fact that she could see someone’s shirt under a lion costume.

I want to know why there was a lion on stage! Tell me about the show! Give me quotations from choreographers, from participants, from members of CCASA, from audience members, from ANYONE. There isn’t a single quote here; that’s pretty impressive for a newspaper article.

Oh, and I learned an important showbiz tip: “A performer needs to draw the audience in with their smiles and enthusiasm, or at least fake it.”

Let’s try an edit: “A student writer needs to draw the audience in with facts and quotations relating to a performance, or at least fake it.”

Sincerely,
John Dodig