Looking at the Dance

In 1973, when Arlene Croce, the dean of American dance critics for the last quarter century, began writing for The New Yorker, the dance boom was at its peak. The public appetite for dance, from the most traditional forms of ballet to the most experimental postmodern varieties, seemed insatiable. “Uptown” dance was exploding throughout the American mainstream; “downtown” dance was sinking roots in former hippie enclaves. With the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, the number of dance companies soared, new venues came into being and choreographers, like audiences, proliferated.

Twenty-three years later, in 1996, when Croce gave up her column, that world had vanished. Its titans--George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins, Robert Joffrey, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey--were inactive or no more, and the companies that survived them had either changed identity or ceased to perform. New choreographers had come on the scene, and new artistic and moral imperatives like multiculturalism had replaced the old verities. Huge sums were being spent on “Draculas” and other evening-long clinkers while companies disbanded, and dance studios were swallowed up by the real estate market.

“Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker” is Croce’s fourth collection of criticism. Unlike its predecessors, it spans the whole of her time at the magazine, registering the shifts and tides of a quarter of a century. What is lost in depth is gained in breadth, in being able to trace the full arc of the period, its premieres, discoveries, trends and failures. But for all the history packed into these hundreds of pages, “Writing in the Dark” is a kind of memoir, the journey of a powerful critical intellect from passionate engagement with her subject to voluntary renunciation of the act of criticism. “Is dance really alive when nearly everything that happens is a version of something that has already happened?” she asks in 1990. By decade’s end, with her eyes increasingly trained on the past, dance seems alive only in the palimpsest of memory.

Born in Providence, R.I., Croce moved to New York as a college student in the 1950s. She reveled in the city, its theaters, art houses and burgeoning avant-garde scene. She wrote her first criticism for Film Culture and Film Quarterly. She saw Merce Cunningham, Graham and the Bolshoi. And she fell in love with Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. By 1957 she had become a self-confessed “addict,” one of those hyperactive “balletomanes” or “ballet fanatics” who comprised the “insider” audience for Ballet Review, the journal she founded in 1965. In 1972, she published her only full-length work (apart from collections of criticism), “The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book.” By 1973, when she started writing for The New Yorker, she had nearly two decades of dance-going behind her, the sharpest eye in the business and a pen to match.

Croce was at her best in the 1970s; for the first time she had a mainstream platform for her work, a venue with a belletristic tradition and limitless freedom for its writers. Her excitement is palpable in the opening pages of “Writing in the Dark.” How much dance there was to see, and what passion it kindled! Croce summons up her gods with silver-tongued magic. Of Mikhail Baryshnikov just before his 1974 defection from the Kirov Ballet: “Perhaps his greatest gift is his sense of fantasy in classical gesture.” And soon after that momentous event, of his performance in “Giselle” with American Ballet Theatre: “The dancing pours out of him as if in a fever of pent-up eloquence.” Of Suzanne Farrell, Balanchine’s great muse, when she returned to the New York City Ballet in 1975: “Your eye gorges on her variety, your heart stops at the brink of every precipice.” And of Farrell’s farewell performance in “Vienna Waltzes” in 1989, when an era seemed to come to an end: “[I]t was an unadulterated Farrell performance, with enough of the old touchstones . . . to hold us awe-struck: the anguishing in her partner’s arm, . . . the sudden quiet melt to the floor as the big melody is about to enter and her partner comes to claim her and, finally and unforgettably, the back-bent exit into the wings.”

No one else can make you see a dance as Croce can. She works in images rather than technical terms and is intent on conveying the impression of a dance when the performance is over, a memory infused with suggestive power and rhythmic urgency. “After a silence in which nobody moves,” she writes of the final moments of Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments,” “the great fugue of the finale begins its inexorable massed attack. . . . We see a succession of sky-sweeping lifts; we see a runway lined by a chorus of grands battements turned to the four points of the compass.” Reviewing Natalia Makarova’s 1975 staging of “La Bayadere” for American Ballet Theatre, Croce is swept away by the work’s “grand-scale symphonism,” by the “vast, tireless corps [that] responds in echoes, diverges, vanishes, regathers into garlands, into gateways, tosses, and freezes.” Twelve years later, when the company unveiled its new “Sleeping Beauty,” she reels back to the Royal Ballet’s tours to the United States in the 1950s and “the glad young Margot Fonteyn who tiptoed out under the arches of Act I, greeted the audience in arabesque, and then . . . burst back upon us, the quintessential Aurora, the personification of youth and spring.” What history lies in her mind’s eye!

Although ballet is Croce’s great love, she can write perceptively about modern dance. There are wonderful evocations of Graham and glowing accounts of works by Paul Taylor and Cunningham. She admires Twyla Tharp, a discovery of the 1960s, and Mark Morris, a revelation of the 1980s.

But, increasingly, it is loss that concerns her--the diminishment of traditions like flamenco, the deterioration of the legacies of Graham and Tudor, the disappearance of “whole-souled passion” in the new generation of Bolshoi dancers. And with bitterness and growing ire she observes the “catastrophically swift decline” of the Balanchine repertory under the New York City Ballet’s artistic director, Peter Martins, since the choreographer’s death in 1983. “The ballets have had their hearts torn out.”

Croce wielded enormous power in the dance world. She praised, but she also damned. Her friend and longtime associate Robert Cornfield, whom Croce thanks in her opening essay for having selected the material for “Writing in the Dark,” has kept the “pans” to a minimum. Croce’s dislikes were legion, and in writing about them she often crossed the line separating aesthetic judgment from moral or political opprobrium. Thus, her dismissal of Alvin Ailey’s “church-basement dance-recital mold,” Maurice Bejart’s “alien and diseased repertory,” Murray Louis’ “fatuous sleaze,” Pina Bausch’s “feminist tirades” and “glum, despondent dabblings in theatrical Dada.” She abhors everything “High Concept,” “designer-label choreography,” “pseudo-ballet,” “Eurotrash” and “victim art,” the subject of her notorious “non-review” of Bill T. Jones’ “Still/Here” (which she never saw), in which she denounced a laundry list of political evils back to “the proletarian thirties, when big-government began.”

Croce’s stance as a critic was deeply conservative. She was ever seeking that privileged realm beyond the temporal, an Eden of “luminous inscriptions” left in space by the dancers. This, she writes, is “our idea of the heaven of classicism.” To some extent that Eden is what all critics seek. But for most of them, idealism does not mean ruling out almost everything that has happened in the last 50 years. Croce wrote for National Review in the 1960s and in 1972 contributed a scathing attack on feminism to Commentary. She cannot abide any ideas remotely connected with egalitarianism, racial democracy or cultural pluralism. The 1960s are anathema. She is a highbrow and a dandy, contemptuous of the masses but also of bluestockings, intellectuals and ideas. One of her favorite rhetorical devices is the pop culture put-down. But the references all come from the 1920s and 1930s, when Fred and Ginger made magic on the silver screen and Bill Robinson tapped for Shirley Temple, before rock, race riots and feminists tarnished celluloid visions of romance and racial harmony.

No wonder she looks out on the 21st century with such dismay. Everywhere companies are in shambles, their styles and repertories in “disintegration.” Not a single classical choreographer lurks on the horizon. On that gloomy note, “Writing in the Dark” ends and, with it, one senses, Croce’s career as a critic. There is nothing left for her to write about. But people are still dancing, and some of them are dancing well.