The Afterimage of Arlene Croce

Arlene Croce, who wrote the Dancing column in The New Yorker from 1973 to 1996, died on December 16th, at the age of ninety. She was a towering figure, a critic who, through sheer power of prose, put dance—not only criticism but dance itself—on the cultural map. She was also one of a generation of women critics who insisted on having a voice in art: Vendler on poetry; Kael on movies; Sontag, Malcolm, Didion, Oates on everything. But these others stood on tall shoulders, able to draw on whole libraries of critical writing about their chosen subjects. Croce, writing about the ephemeral, often overlooked art form of dance—an art of memory, she called it—had none of that. Her few literary precedents included her colleague Edwin Denby, maybe Aby Warburg, perhaps a few nineteenth-century European or Russian writers. And, as a dance critic, she faced a prejudice as old as Puritanism: An art of the body? What could be intellectual—or moral—about that? Croce took dancing seriously, pulled dances apart and analyzed them rigorously, and her clarity and imagination, her stunning insights, and even her glaring flaws—all this was there on the page. This passion and discipline made her a kind of alter ego of—or perhaps a ministry to—the art. She had an unrelenting determination to say what she had seen.

And what she saw most was the art of George Balanchine. She wrote about Jerome Robbins, Antony Tudor, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, post-modern dance, and Fred Astaire, but Balanchine and his dancers became her obsession, her art, her world. And because she believed in dance—“if it moves, I’m interested; if it moves to music, I’m in love”—and in his artistry, she was unsparing in her assessments, which could be as harsh as they were exalted. Looking back, though, her love was never exclusive, and her passions extended across the postwar dance scene. She knew it was a great moment, and she became a “dance addict,” as she once put it, voracious in her opinions and appetites.

When a writer dies, the only thing to do is to read her, so it seems worth celebrating Croce briefly in her own words.

On Balanchine:

If George Balanchine were a novelist or a playwright or a movie director, instead of a choreographer, his studies of women would be among the most discussed and most influential artistic achievements of our time. But because Balanchine works without words and customarily without a libretto, and because the position of women in ballet has long been a dominant one, we take his extraordinary creatures for granted, much as if they were natural happenings. It is part of Balanchine’s genius to make the extraordinary seem natural; how many contemporary male artists, in ballet or out of it, can compete with him in depicting contemporary women? His work is pervaded by a modern consciousness; his women do not always live for love, and their destinies are seldom defined by the men they lean on. Sexual complicity in conflict with individual freedom is a central theme of the Balanchine pas de deux. The man’s role is usually that of fascinated observer and would-be manipulator—the artist who seeks to possess his subject and finds that he may only explore it. For Balanchine, it is the man who sees and follows, and it is the woman who acts and guides. . . . The image of the unattainable woman is one that comes from nineteenth-century Romantic ballet, but in Balanchine the ballerina is unattainable simply because she is a woman, not because she’s a supernatural or enchanted being. He can make comedy or tragedy, and sometimes a blend of both, out of the conflict between a woman’s free will and her need for a man; he can carry you step by step into dramas in which sexual relationships are not defined by sex or erotic tension alone, and in this he is unique among choreographers. He is unique, too, in going beyond the limits of what women have conventionally expressed on the stage.

On Balanchine’s modern woman, as embodied by the dancer Suzanne Farrell:

Farrell’s style in Diamonds . . . is based on risk; she is almost always off balance and always secure. Her confidence in moments of great risk gives her the leeway to suggest what no ballerina has suggested before her—that she can sustain herself, and that she can go it alone. . . . In the finale, her partner (Jacques d’Amboise) is only there to stop her. She slips like a fish through his hands. She doesn’t stop, doesn’t wait, doesn’t depend, and she can’t fall. She’s like someone who has learned to breathe thin air. Of course, the autonomy of the ballerina is an illusion, but Farrell is the extremest form of this illusion we have yet seen, and it makes Diamonds a riveting spectacle about the freest woman alive.

On Taylor’s “Esplanade”:

Paul Taylor’s new ballet, Esplanade, set to the music of Bach, is twenty-eight minutes of dancing without a single dance step. The dancers walk, or run, shifting direction with a light hop. . . . When you think about it technically—about the materials it is made of—Esplanade involves the same negation of professional dance expertise that has preoccupied certain radical choreographers in the past decade. But Esplanade doesn’t force you to think about it technically, whereas “minimalist dance”—or “people dance,” to use a term in recent circulation—does, because it’s often so cryptic. It’s so grayly modest, so pure, that it leaves out the reason it was made. Taylor’s piece engages the audience completely, so that we never have to think about what has been left out, and we know exactly why it was made. It has pristine beauty, elementary drive, democratic appeal—all of that. But when I left the Lyceum Theatre, where it had its New York premiére, I wasn’t thinking, How beautifully minimal! I was thinking that I’d seen a classic of American dance.

On Cunningham:

Cunningham’s hands are like chords of music; full articulation flows straight to the electric extremities. He really does seem to have more in his little finger than most dancers have in their whole bodies. And the diversity and specificity of nuance of which his body is capable, after more than thirty-five years of professional dancing, are amazing. . . . Cunningham’s choreography has no external subject, and as an object it removes itself irrevocably and more swiftly than dancing that is set to music—music is a powerful fixitive and memory aid. Although its basic vocabulary comes from classical ballet and its style is more precise than most ballet choreography, the dancing is by classical standards nonconsequential. It faces in all directions. It does not draw toward and away from climaxes. At first, it seems to have no markers that pass the eye smoothly along. But soon the sense of it as a series of growing actions becomes deeply absorbing. Individual dancers begin to fascinate and can be studied like progress charts. . . . Performers like this, and choreography that attempts to rid dancing of familiarity, dullness, and inertia, antagonize some people. The company recently gave a lecture-demonstration at Town Hall. As we watched the dancers going through some new virtuosic combinations, an irritated voice called out, “We came here to see dancing. When are you gonna dance?” Cunningham has lost none of his power.

I had read Croce for years but did not meet her until 2011, when I began working on a book about Balanchine. She had agreed to spend a day with me and so I took the train to Providence, Rhode Island, where she lived with her sister. I arrived at her small home on an unremarkable street, and sat with her at her dining-room table over a modest lunch. She was gentler, quieter than I had imagined, square shoulders, poised, with a soft smile and upright posture. She’d been born in Providence, she told me—her father was in textiles—and had moved briefly with her family to Asheville, North Carolina, before attending college in Greensboro and then at Barnard, where she studied English and read R. P. Blackmur, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling. Her first love was not dance but film, and she spent long days downtown going from cinema to cinema. She talked about the “electric” and life-changing experience of attending the N.Y.C.B. première of Balanchine’s “Agon,” in 1957. She didn’t look back.

Mainly, she wanted to talk about memory and not being able to pin dance down, and about her own memory being spotty now and how she was wary of writing from the bits and pieces that remained. Listening, I found myself thinking that dance was deserting her, leaving her before she was leaving—and before she was quite ready. She had always insisted that what she was reviewing was not a dance itself but an “afterimage” imprinted in her mind, something personal and partial to throw “out there” into the cultural conversation, whatever that might be. Which is why, even when I disagree with Croce intensely, I often find myself in conversation with her. Her criticism, written in the heat of the afterimage, with all of the intelligence and grace she could muster, is both a great read and a historical document.

She spoke, too, about taking care of the reader—presenting things confidently even when they are built out of sand. If she had to write something for her tombstone, she said, it would be “Do it anyway.” I was struck by the feat of writing from memory and doubt, and the ways that writing about dance is always—like dance itself—a fiction. How lucky we are that Croce saw what she saw when she saw it and lived to tell the tale. ♦