Arlene Croce, who as the dance critic of The New Yorker from 1973 to 1996 was both the most revered and the most feared dance writer in the United States, died on Monday in Johnston, R.I. She was 90.
Her death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by her sister, Marcia Croce.
Ms. Croce was loved for her wit — but not by those she skewered. Her criticism could be wicked, even merciless. She once described the feet of the ballerina Carla Fracci as “flapping along the floor like a loose mudguard.” The choreography of Gerald Arpino, she wrote, was a “love letter from an illiterate all in capitals.”
She made her first big splash in 1972 with “The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book,” a history and assessment of the popular Astaire-Rogers movies, most of them released in the 1930s. Newsweek called it “the best study in popular culture ever written.”
“No one has ever described dance in the movies the way she does,” the film critic Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote of Ms. Croce. “She’s a slangy, elegant writer; her compressed descriptions are evocative and analytic at the same time, and so precise and fresh that while she brings the pleasure of the dances back she adds to it.”
In 1973, when William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, created the dance critic position for Ms. Croce, dance in America had never been more popular, and New York was recognized as its capital.
“That dance could ever have been as rich, as varied, and as plentiful as it was in the seventies and eighties now seems a miracle,” she wrote in the preface to “Writing in the Dark” (2000), the last of four collections of her reviews and essays.
At the heart of that miracle, for Ms. Croce, were the ballets of George Balanchine and the dancers of New York City Ballet. They inspired some of her most impassioned writing. Marveling at how the risk-taking ballerina Suzanne Farrell could “suggest what no ballerina has suggested before her — that she can sustain herself, that she can go it alone,” Ms. Croce called her “the freest woman alive,” likening her to “someone who has learned to breathe thin air.”
Praising “Afterimages” (1977), her first collection of reviews, the literary critic Richard Poirier, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Ms. Croce the “Jane Austen of dance criticism.” And in The New York Review of Books, the dance-world eminence Lincoln Kirstein judged the book to be “the most reliable chronicle of theatrical dancing in the United States” during the years it covered, 1966 to 1977.
Ms. Croce resisted what she saw as hype, fashion and overinflated reputations. The work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, she wrote, “enshrines the amateur’s faith in psychopathy as drama.” Most of postmodernism she dismissed. “The rebellion of the sixties,” she wrote, had “no results that were interesting.”
Her ideal was based in classicism — dance that is about itself — and in musical responsiveness. She found that ideal realized not only in Balanchine and Astaire, but also in the modern dance of Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham (even though Cunningham radically separated dance from music). She found it in the work of Twyla Tharp, whose ascent in the 1970s she championed, and of Mark Morris, whose career she gave a critical boost in 1984, when he was in his late 20s and little known.
But most important to Ms. Croce was Balanchine. His death, in 1983, was a blow that to her “reduced the cultural vitality of New York by half.” She grew critical of New York City Ballet’s direction under Balanchine’s successor, Peter Martins. “The ballets have had their hearts torn out,” she wrote in 1993. “The ruin is all but complete.”
Ms. Croce’s most notorious essay, published in 1994 in The New Yorker under the title “Discussing the Undiscussable,” was about a work she refused to see: Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here,” a mixed-media piece concerning survivors of life-threatening illnesses. Because the work used videotaped testimony by terminally ill patients, Ms. Croce described it as “beyond the reach of criticism.”
She considered Mr. Jones, a prominent choreographer who had recently revealed that he was H.I.V. positive, to be “the most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and martyrs,” part of a trend, she wrote, of “victim art,” which she connected to the arts bureaucracy and “the permissive thinking of the sixties.”
The essay provoked a storm of letters and articles, pro and con, and became a flashpoint in the culture wars of the 1990s.
Oddly, Ms. Croce later explained that the essay had started as a comic piece about the plight of critics. “I do not remember a time when the critic has seemed more expendable than now,” she wrote.
She gave up her post at The New Yorker not long after, and she published infrequently in the following decades. A book about Balanchine, contracted in 1986, remained unpublished, except for excerpts collected in a 2023 issue of the journal Dance Index.
Arlene Louise Croce was born in Providence, R.I., on May 5, 1934. She was the oldest of three children in an Italian American working-class family, born to Michael and Louise (Pensa) Croce. Her father was a floor manager in a textile mill. The family later moved to North Carolina when he took a job there.
After two years at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Ms. Croce transferred to Barnard College in New York, graduating in 1955 with a degree in English. Working as an editorial assistant, she spent her nights at the movies and the ballet. The premiere of Balanchine’s “Agon,” in 1957, had a “physiological effect” on her, she said in an interview with Vogue.
“I knew that in some way my life’s work was going to have to be bound up with some aspect of what happened that night,” she added.
In the 1960s, Ms. Croce wrote criticism for the publications Film Culture and Film Quarterly and was also a writer and editor for the conservative magazine National Review. There, she shared pages with Joan Didion, Garry Wills and other writers who, like Ms. Croce, would become star contributors to liberal publications like The New York Review of Books.
Puzzled by the absence of a seriously critical dance magazine, Ms. Croce started one herself, Ballet Review, in 1965, editing and assembling it at her kitchen table in New York. “Because the dancing I saw was so healthy and impressive,” she once explained, “I saw no reason why you couldn’t apply to it the same rigorous standards you would apply to other arts.”
A retrospective screening of Astaire-Rogers films in 1964 was, she said, her “second great epiphany.” With the help of a Guggenheim grant, she expanded an article about them into her book, which led to the job at The New Yorker.
Ms. Croce never married. She had recently been living in Rhode Island with her sister, Marcia, her only immediate survivor. A brother, Jim, died a few years ago.
As Ms. Croce put it in “Writing in the Dark,” she was a “dance illiterate” who had never studied dance formally or took a music lesson. Her career, she wrote, was “proof that you can come to dance knowing nothing of how it is done and still understand it.”
Writing about dance was a “fool’s errand,” she said in the Vogue interview. “That may be one reason why we haven’t had as many great dance critics as we think we should have.”
But you hope, she added, “that there is at least one other person who will read what you’ve got to say about an event and say, ‘Yes, it was like that for me too.’ If that happens, then I think you’ve done your job.”
The post Arlene Croce, Dance Critic With a Biting Wit, Dies at 90 appeared first on New York Times.
