When we sort feedback, we defang the monster.
When I ask people for an example of an important piece of feedback they’ve received, they often go right to a damaging and hurtful review: a published rant, a horrible job review, a cruel social media comment. It’s stayed with them, haunted them over their career. It’s only natural to want to retreat into our shells when we get these. We’ve placed our vulnerable selves on display and been told that what we’ve created isn’t valuable, even that we as humans are worthless.
By the time my opera-theater piece Blood Moon premiered in January 2020, I’d been staying in New York City for five weeks of the darkest months, and for half that time in a hotel. During most daylight hours I’d been in a windowless rehearsal room. I was feeling homesick, tired and stressed. I was eating at a restaurant when I received a Google alert ping. Against my better judgment, I impulsively clicked the link to a Wall Street Journal review:
Japanese theatrical and musical language can translate successfully into Western opera… but “Blood Moon”… didn’t work.
I wanted to leave the restaurant and get on the first plane home. But I didn’t. I set my phone down, took a deep breath, then picked it back up and called Ken, enlisting him as an ally to help me get through this.
After we read the reviewer’s assessment of other festival works together, we agreed she seemed skeptical of the entire festival. That’s when we turned to what Ken and I call “sorting.” Before we decide whether feedback is “right” or “wrong,” “helpful” or “unhelpful,” we step back and look at where it’s coming from. It’s a simple step, but it turns what feels like a verdict into one person’s perspective.
So we sorted her feedback by how familiar she was with my Person, my Process and my Product.
My Person: she didn’t know me, so she had no sense of what drives my work or what this opera meant to me.
My Process: she didn’t place my piece in the context of my other work and knew nothing about how I make it.
My Product: while she knew a lot about Western opera, she didn’t seem to have as great an understanding of Japanese Noh theater, the tradition my opera was inspired by.
Sorting her feedback immediately helped me place it in context. The review’s fangs were still sharp but no longer lethal. They hadn’t come from an objective deity—one that might inhabit my operas—but another fallible human being.
Ken helped me see that the reviewer had come expecting the conventions of traditional Western opera, while Blood Moonis inspired, in part, by Japanese Noh theater. As this realization sank in, the pain of rejection began to dissipate, and while I still felt its sting, I was able to understand it in a fuller context.
It also left me with a new question: how can I let audiences know ahead of time what kind of experience they’re coming to, so they can meet the work on its own terms?
That evening, Ken helped bring me back from the brink. Afterward, he sternly advised me to never, ever check my phone right after a premiere.