The Legacy of Arlene Croce

Although Arlene Croce was not a trained dancer (her afterschool arts training in childhood was as a painter) she took dancing seriously as both an occasion for pleasure and a cultural endeavor, and she took writing about it to be a serious cultural action as well, at least as important to the mental health of the public as some of the verbiage by politicians and their editors. To my knowledge, she never compromised those principles, even as her range of attention increased and her capacity for engagement deepened. She learned about dancing on the job, so to speak; however, she had nothing to learn about writing. By her early twenties, she possessed a fully formed literary instrument. In her senior year at Barnard, in 1955, she was the first recipient of the Elizabeth Janeway Prize for Prose Writing, just then established by Janeway—a novelist, literary critic, and author of several feminist books about power, which she defined as “the ability not to have to please.” Arlene took Janeway’s brand of feminism to heart: She wrote what she needed to say, not what anyone else needed to hear. It got her into hot water on a number of occasions, especially when what she needed to say hadn’t been entirely considered (as when she asserted in print that some leading downtown dancers had been guided by the aesthetic taste and practices of Robert Wilson, when, in fact, they had not). Yet, even when she was the target of hate mail, she was—by her own standards—free. In an early movie review, her identification with the little boy played by Jean-Pierre Leaud in The Four Hundred Blows is passionate, complete. “The Four Hundred Blows is a film about freedom,” she wrote. “It could, I think, convey this idea to an audience of deaf illiterates in any part of the world because its construction is very nearly as absolutely visual as that of a silent film. Its metaphor for freedom is space. . . .” When, many years later, writing of the “Diamonds” section of Balanchine’s “Jewels,” Arlene spoke of ballerina Suzanne Farrell as the freest woman alive, I believe that in addition to what the metaphor conveyed generally, she meant something particular to herself.

William F. Buckley brought Arlene to his National Review as an editor and, I’m told, published some of her film reviews, which she chose not to collect. However, Phillip Lopate anthologized her 1959 Film Culture review of Pather Panchali and Aparajito, by Satyajit Ray; and her 1960 Film Quarterly review of François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (“The Four Hundred Blows”) is available on JSTOR. These early publications are not only spectacularly argued but are also uniquely individual in their readings of the films and in the cool, sculptured language that articulates those readings—so different from the firecracker prose of Pauline Kael, the friend who suggested to the New Yorker’s editor William Shawn that Arlene’s dance writing would make a good addition to the magazine.

During her first years in New York, Arlene functioned as what used to be called a generalist; she plunged into all the arts. Ballet forcefully seized her imagination, and quite quickly she determined that the core of what captivated her was ballet as George Balanchine practiced it in his choreography and artistic direction of his New York City Ballet. Arlene tracked every major ballet and modern dance company based in the West, as well as a few from the East, during her quarter-century-long tenure at the Dancing column in the New Yorker. Still, when it came to covering Balanchine and New York City Ballet, she chronicled that institution as if she were reporting on one part of her family to another: the tiniest details mattered. Balanchine and NYCB were her home, her grounding, a living embodiment of the entire tradition of classical art, with its muses and its marvels.

And yet, her longest-lived love of any dance genre was tap. Before the Museum of Modern Art put on the festival of RKO Astaire-Rogers films that led her to write her historic study The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (basing its encyclopedic structure on Lincoln Kirstein’s ballet canon Movement and Metaphor), there was Arlene the kid who liked to practice tap steps on street corners in her Providence neighborhood as she remembered them from the movies.

(I was once in a taxi, caught in a huge traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge, with Arlene and, among several others, her mother, who, to Arlene’s embarrassed delight, regaled the group with stories of her childhood, including that one about dancing on the street.) During the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, Arlene reviewed tap for the New Yorker—the programs of tap greats at BAM, Gail Conrad, et al—among the conventional dance genres and a few outliers, such as Meredith Monk’s performance opera “Quarry,” she reported on in her column. In 2016, retired from the New Yorker, she published an essay-review in the New York Review of Books to praise two new histories of American tap dance, one by scholar Megan Pugh and one by Brian Seibert, dance critic at the New York Times and author, this past month, of an obit for Arlene in that paper. Her NYRB essay leads with her remembrance of the be-bop tap virtuoso Baby Laurence (perhaps at the Newport Jazz Festival, in the 1970s?):

Probably the first dance anyone ever did was a tap dance. Beating the feet on the ground was elementary communication; doing it in time was a pleasure. The tribal dances of sub-Saharan Africa amazed Europeans with their rhythmic exactness as long ago as the eleventh century. The dancing was monitored by the beating of drums, a practice that survives in modern-day performances in which dancer and drummer exchange signals and rhythms. In these purely percussive conversations the art has its most refined, most radical expression. I once watched Baby Laurence for nearly twenty minutes dance deeper and deeper into literally radical territory. Between the dancer and the drummer, the human root of jazz lay exposed.

Arlene Croce, David Vaughan, and Robert Cornfield founded Ballet Review in 1965. Courtesy of Robert Greskovic

Baby Laurence, of whom there are films, was admired by musicians and other great tap dancers. He was important to Arlene for his complicated rhythms, which, prior to the Age of YouTube, she used to listen to on a Baby Laurence LP. It was his rhythmic genius that must have connected him to Astaire for Arlene, I think, since the movement languages of the two men were different. As Arlene noted in the NYRB, Baby Laurence was a percussionist on the hoof, so to speak; Astaire, also a drummer, employed tap as part of his dance practice, but only a part. The thing is, there was much more to Arlene’s idea of rhythmic dancing than Astaire, just as there was much more to her idea of dancing as a theatrical genre than ballet.

Of her four collections of reviews, the first one, Afterimages—with its marvelous Alexey Brodovitch-like cover photo, by the late pianist and ballet critic David Daniel, of a cresting moment in Balanchine’s “La Valse”—is the most immediately entertaining, perhaps because its perspective is the simplest. In the first part of her critic’s career, Arlene’s writing was assured and enthusiastic. Her Fred & Ginger book was based on her having seen each film once. She attended a performance and knew what she thought. However, by the time she was writing regularly for the New Yorker and becoming immersed in issues of repertory and artistic influences, her divine assurance in her initial perceptions was no longer inevitable. Her second collection of New Yorker columns—Going to the Dance (the title a tip of the hat to Edwin Denby’s collection Looking at the Dance)—contains essays that are packed with contextual information and layered with intellectual dilemmas. Here, Arlene sometimes noted that she would misunderstand a dance on her first sighting of it and so she would go back for another look—and enlightenment. One of the most amazing columns in this magisterial book (“Murder, He Said, Said He”) concerns a Broadway project, When We Were Very Young, by Twyla Tharp that Arlene, a Tharp fan, considered a failure despite its individual points of fascination. Upon returning for a second look, she discovered she had been blind to themes of incest the work had excavated from a well-known poem by A.A. Milne. Her frames of reference explode. In the space of one eleven-line passage she refers to the Olympic skater John Curry, Brahms, Seurat, Al Capp’s comic strip “L’il Abner,” and Pop Art.

And then, after a double spacing, she is reviewing the Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre, whose innocent virtuosity of whirling plates cleanses the column back to a condition of child’s pleasure and prompts her to remember an even more spectacular company, the Shenyang Troupe from the People’s Republic of China. The New Yorker let her devise her columns as she wished, just as it also let her write the longest paragraphs to be found outside the Congressional Record. In another fantastical column in this collection, “Notes on a Natural Man,” the main subject is Merce Cunningham’s personal quality as an actor dancing and the immersion of his choreography in the mutability of Nature. Then, after a double space, comes a tiny paragraph on how New York City Ballet is back performing after a musicians’ strike and how the audience reception “did not end until Balanchine had peeped through the curtain twice to wave good night.” That lone detail was sufficient to bring NYCB back into Arlene’s world.

A mailer for Ballet Review, handwritten by Arlene Croce, from circa 1967. Courtesy of Robert Greskovic

Arlene, of course, was an editor herself—cofounder, in 1965 (with the critic and Cunningham archivist David Vaughan and the agent Robert Cornfield), and the first editor of the independent journal of speculative thought Ballet Review. The year of BR’s founding was also the year that the American Dance Guild’s Dance Scope was founded, and in short order other independent dance journals popped up. Dance Perspectives had been going since the 1960s, and to it were added Dance Chronicle, Arabesque, and the mimeographed EDDY. All took dance seriously, but Ballet Review was the only one that wasn’t earnest about its seriousness. Put together by Arlene at her kitchen table, it embodied not only her take-no-prisoners intellect and inquiring mind but also her streak of mischief and provocation. In early issues, she assembled a team of critics and choreographers (including the brilliant choreographer and designer James Waring and the comic master Peter Anastos) who contributed to a grid in which each of them graded new works, from A+ to F-. In an essay on dance critics, Arlene hung the Saturday Review’s Walter Terry out to dry, hoisted on his own petard. (“There is only one Tallchief!” she reports him as declaring in print, adding, on behalf of Marjorie as well as her sister, Maria, “Of course, there are two.”)

At the New Yorker, Arlene’s editing side did not easily tolerate mistakes in her copy—or unsanctioned monkeying around with her words—by the magazine’s staff. And, once, she couldn’t resist treating the back of the book as an outpost of her Ballet Review. The editor William Shawn (who invented the “Dancing” column for her expressly) did not countenance comedy in the arts columns, but Arlene fooled him by filing a column about “Ballet Alert,” which she described decades later as “a fictitious telephone service for hyperactive balletomanes.” This explanation is contained in her introduction to her last collection of columns, Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker, which contains a number of hitherto-uncollected columns, most prominent the now-notorious “Discussing the Undiscussable,” the column where she, so to speak, kicked the hornet’s nest by declaring that the Bill T. Jones work “Still/Here”—announced by his company in advance as a dance having to do with sufferers of terminal ailments and miseries—was, in effect, holding her critical freedom hostage to obligatory sentiment. And so she was going to explain why what it was doing was pernicious to criticism, something she knew from experience would be a fact without her having to see it, even though she was discussing it in print. At that time, the New Yorker’s editor, Tina Brown—who had an appetite for the sensational—was was privately said to be gung-ho to run the story.

In terms of dance criticism as deadline journalism, Arlene wasn’t wrong; critics (and/or their editors) constantly make decisions about whether they can attend shows, much less write about them, based entirely on press releases, practical knowledge of the moment, spatial considerations, and gut instinct. There are too many shows and not world enough and time to cover everything. Yet, “right” as she may have been in a practical context, to a dance field deeply damaged by AIDS and a tributary of journalism in which firsthand reporting is sacred, Arlene’s cri de coeur on behalf of maintaining purity for critics was not going to cut anyone’s mustard, much less pull readers in to share the comic spirit that—as she noted in her introduction to her last collection—engendered it.

Going back through Arlene’s work—well, versions of her work, for she continued to edit ruthlessly between publication in the New Yorker and the collections from Knopf or Farrar, Straus and Giroux—I continue to be amazed by how alive the essays are, how well Arlene’s idea that she is reviewing not the dance in itself but the “afterimage” of the dance serves her as a freeing permission to script her thoughts into a narrative of consciousness that becomes, not Arlene’s consciousness but that of the dance after all. Her way with a declarative sentence is positively magical. The reviews no longer have evaluation as their destination; instead, they exist in order to scope out the identity of the experience, insofar as the afterimage makes that available. Evaluation is a “by the way.”

George Balanchine takes a bow after premiere of “Davidsbündlertänze” for New York City Ballet. Photograph by Martha Swope

It is in search of the identity of the afterimage for the Balanchine ballet Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” that Arlene—capable of pique and irritation that readers today can translate as cruelty—demonstrates another side of her being: Her integrity.

Her review of the premiere was published in the New Yorker on July 14, 1980. A 1982 postscript to its inclusion in Going to the Dance explains that, in her New Yorker column, she had made a mistake concerning the Schumann music and the options it posed for the choreographer. That mistake had prompted a letter from David Daniel. Some 700 words long, his letter is then quoted in full. It discusses the themes relating to Robert and Clara in the score and what options the deployment of those themes afforded Balanchine in his complicated distribution of the dance action. Nothing that Arlene has ever written about the relationship of dance and music in Balanchine’s ballets surpasses this letter. Indeed, nothing I’ve ever read by anyone on the subject comes up to it. David Daniel, reported by his friend the art critic Jed Perl to have succumbed to complications of AIDS, lost his life in 2000 at the lamentably early age of fifty-eight. In publishing his peerless analysis of Schumann and Balanchine in the context of her own book, Arlene gave a fragment of his fabulous knowledge-hoard and imagination the gift of life as long as her book endures.

More influential than David’s intellectual virtuosity on her, though, was the abiding spirit of the poet, critic, and erstwhile dancer and choreographer Edwin Denby. In 1983, the same year that Denby took his own life, at the age of eighty (a couple months after Balanchine died), Arlene wrote a relatively brief remembrance of him. Four years later, she composed a longer meditation. For her third collection, Sight Lines, she put the remembrances together as the valedictory conclusion of the book. They are not excerptable; however, nothing else I’ve read by her gives as much of Arlene. One watches her remembering how Denby had tried to explain to her that a stage work failed to take into account “how shapes change their proportions in dancing” and follows Arlene as she tries to understand him and can’t, while he persists, so gently, to get through to her—though it takes years for her finally to comprehend what he was trying to say. The piece also shows Arlene the Editor working with Denby the Scrupulous Writer and her frustration of going into the wee hours of the night with him as, in an effort to be clear, he ponders and adjusts every sentence, word, syllable, sometimes out of existence. It shows Arlene reading and, in considering the Denby Dance Writings, realizing that the Denby of 1940 was in love with the dancer (and “critic,” Denby wrote) Serge Lifar while the Denby of 1950 had a dramatically different point of view about him: That it was more than okay—that it was part of the critical process—to change one’s mind. A reader sees Arlene’s sympathy for Denby, her rueful wish she had had more patience and taken him more seriously sooner, her affection for his images and stories, her open emotions. Indeed, in places, one discovers her maternal protectiveness of him in memory. Recently, the dance critic Elizabeth Kendall published a similar kind of remembrance about Arlene in the New York Times. So lovely.

In 1989, at the international critics’ conference that Janice Ross and Stephen Steinberg organized in California for the Dance Critics Association, Arlene gave a speech about the legacy of Balanchine in which she drew a distinction between his art, invisible and mysterious, and his craft, which could be seen and discussed. The art was undiscussable. It’s a monumental summary of her thoughts about the choreographer, an entire book in a few pages, and uniquely Arlene. Would any critic today draw such a distinction between art and craft? If you find one, you’ve discovered the legacy of Arlene Croce.

Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff's writings on the arts, dance a specialty, have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other periodicals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Her most recent books are Why Dance Matters (Yale) and Dance in America: A Reader's Anthology (Library of America).

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