How does an artist give timeless values a timely form? This is the essential question that Arlene Croce, the dance critic who died in December at the age of ninety, never stopped asking. I don’t think anybody who cares about the arts hasn’t asked the same question. It doesn’t matter whether your fundamental concern is the musical, visual, literary, or theatrical arts. A frozen academicism is almost inevitably the result when the timeless overtakes the timely. When the timely overwhelms the timeless, all you’re left with is a fad.
Croce explored these perilous possibilities with clarity and honesty for some fifty years. She believed that dance, for all its fragility, carried some echo of eternity. In the sparkling reviews of theatrical events that she published in The New Yorker in the 1970s and 1980s, she found her answer in the urgency that a great choreographer, George Balanchine, and great dancers, especially Suzanne Farrell, brought to ballet steps and sequences of steps that were centuries old. Equally important for Croce was the reimagining of all kinds of movement—from the simplest walking steps to the elaborate conventions of flamenco or ballroom dancing—in the modern dance works of Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, and Mark Morris. Although she spent most of her career as a journalistic critic covering the events of the day, I wouldn’t want her death to pass without recognizing the deeper ideas—and overarching unity of thought—that informed everything from her generous-spirited early writings to some of her later work, in which the prose became less seductive, at times almost clinical, and the bleak conclusions provoked bewilderment and even controversy.
By the time Croce began publishing in The New Yorker in 1973 she was nearly forty and had already been writing about the arts for many years. While her presence at the premiere of Agon in 1957 marked the beginning of a lifelong devotion to Balanchine’s art, for a long time her allegiances were divided between movies and dance, enthusiasms united in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, which received considerable attention when it was published in 1972. Meanwhile Ballet Review, the magazine she helped found and almost single-handedly edited and published beginning in 1965, became a forum where critics and historians, many at the beginning of distinguished careers, brought scholarly reach and theoretical depth to the study of dance. (An added bonus was the drawings that Croce’s friend Edward Gorey contributed for some covers.) Writing for a range of publications before going to The New Yorker—Dancing Times, Harper’s, Playbill, Ballet Review—Croce sounded the themes she would explore all her life: the critic’s responsibility as truth teller; the challenge of reimagining old choreography for new times; the discovery of fresh dance experiences; the tensions and cross-fertilizations between classical ballet and modern dance; the centrality of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet in the ongoing struggle to reconcile tradition and innovation. Croce, while by no means the only writer to focus on these issues, pursued them with an energy and insistence all her own.
Arlene and I became friends sometime in the 1980s. I had seen many of the dance events she’d been writing about and had read everything she’d published. What I hadn’t known was that she had taken an interest in some of my writing about the visual arts. As our friendship deepened, we often found ourselves discussing, along with the particulars of one or another art, the more general principles—the aesthetic principles—that shape all the arts and their relationship with society. As the writer Elizabeth Kendall observed in a beautiful reminiscence published in The New York Times, Croce believed “that writing about one art meant engaging with all the arts.” When on one of my last visits I asked her what she’d been reading, I wasn’t surprised that it was a couple of books by Edmund Wilson—not the predictable titles like Axel’s Castle or To the Finland Station but Europe Without Baedeker, his account of Europe after World War II, and one of his very last books, A Window on Russia, with its reflections on Pushkin and Tolstoy. “He’s a genius” was how she summed up Wilson, an American original who during a long career tackled an extraordinary range of subjects.
Croce was another American original. She was one of a triumvirate, along with Lincoln Kirstein and Edwin Denby, who explained how an extraordinary dance culture, much of it grounded in ancient principles and practices, flourished amid the disorderly magnificence of America’s pluralistic democracy. Kirstein, whose book Movement and Metaphor (1970) offered an analytical approach to matters of style that Croce found sympathetic, was not only a commentator but also a participant in this cultural drama: he brought Balanchine to America and spearheaded the founding of New York City Ballet. As for Denby, who was trained as a modern dancer in Europe and much admired as a poet, his writings about dance, mostly published between the 1930s and the 1960s, form a diptych with Croce’s work from the 1970s onward. In the 1970s, inscribing a volume of his poems to her, he wrote, “For Arlene—the best dance critic of all of us.”
What joined these three writers was what Croce, in a long essay occasioned by Kirstein’s memoir Mosaic (1994), referred to as “the realism-idealism equation.” All three were interested in modern dance, even Kirstein, who was glad to have Martha Graham and Paul Taylor involved, at least temporarily, with New York City Ballet. But ballet held a special, exalted place for these writers, as the theatrical enterprise in which life’s unruliness and art’s orderliness could best be knit together. In a salute to Denby after his death in 1983, Croce singled out her friend’s way of describing that dynamic: “Art takes what in life is an accidental pleasure and tries to repeat and prolong it.” Croce knew there was no aspect of a choreographer’s or a dancer’s life that couldn’t influence their work. She also believed—this was holy writ with her—that nothing about an artist’s life had any place in the work unless it had been reimagined as art. “Classical and Modern,” Croce wrote in one of the hundreds of manuscript pages she left in her study at the time of her death, “are not antithetical. Throughout its history, classical ballet has incorporated the modern; if it had not done so, it could not have remained classical. We would have had to call it ‘antique’ dance.”
David Daniel, a dear friend of hers and the author of some memorable essays and reviews, once said to me, partly in jest, that the only reason Croce ever wrote about anything other than New York City Ballet was to remind readers of the broad perspectives she brought to her exploration of Balanchine’s genius. Certainly it was in some of her writing about New York City Ballet that she came closest to defining what she saw as the limitless potential of dance. In one of her most widely admired essays, “Free and More Than Equal,” she described a 1975 performance by Suzanne Farrell in “Diamonds,” the climactic third act of the evening-long ballet Jewels. As Farrell danced—the music is from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3 in D Major—Croce marveled at how her extraordinary virtuosity executing classical steps released her from the traditional dependence on her partner, in this instance the great Jacques d’Amboise. She wrote about the “off-center balances maintained with light support or no support at all” and the “long, supported adagio the point of which is to let us see how little support she actually needs.” “Farrell’s style,” she continued, “is based on risk; she is almost always off balance and always secure.” Croce saw a thrilling reimagining of the role of the ballerina, which some observers by the 1970s regarded as a throwback: “In the finale [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.” Farrell, Croce concluded, had created “a riveting spectacle about the freest woman alive.”
If Croce found in classical ballet, especially Balanchine’s, timeless values in a timely form, she looked to modern dance for a process almost exactly the reverse: timely values taking on a timeless form. That’s the gist of another defining essay, “Mark Morris Comes to Town” (1984), which helped establish the choreographer, still in his twenties, as the new face of modern dance. Croce began by discussing everything about Morris that epitomized the time in which he was living: his “curly-haired, androgynously handsome” looks and what she referred to as his “transsexual chic.” But that was only the beginning: “He’s committed to his time and place, he seizes on the theatricality of it, but he doesn’t try to be anything more than a good choreographer and a completely sincere theatre artist.” For Croce that was everything. Morris had what she called “the raw gift of choreography.” This, she wrote, was “a kind of sanctuary.” And this sanctuary—the choreographic gift—made it possible for any material to become riveting theatrical art, even material that on its own terms didn’t necessarily interest her.
Croce’s telepathic gift for turning theatrical events into scintillating prose left readers eager for more. Even her eviscerations—of the modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch or some fossilized revival of a classic by American Ballet Theatre—could inspire glee, because they so obviously reflected another side of her avidity. What kicked off more ambivalent emotions were her efforts, increasingly urgent in the 1980s and 1990s, to warn readers that the catalytic relationship between the timely and the timeless was extraordinarily fragile. Always admired as a truth teller, Croce found herself offering some truths that even her friends found difficult to absorb.
In some ways the most challenging position she ever took involved her clear-eyed assessment of New York City Ballet’s creative collapse in the years after Balanchine’s death in 1983. Writing in 1993, she complained that the company was wasting hours of rehearsal on “straightening the lines, getting the dancers to keep together,” while for Balanchine the point had never been that the dancers “move as one” but that “they moved.” As the imaginative heights generated by the choreographer’s day-by-day involvement with his dancers faded, Croce documented the company’s descent into bland academicism. For anyone who shared her admiration for Balanchine’s towering art, this was a bitter pill, the truth nobody wanted to face. Some accused her of exaggeration or a misplaced nostalgia. Croce’s unsparing critique of the company was in some sense a family argument, painful for passionate students of Balanchine’s art, while the wider world remained and apparently remains loyal to the company.
The situation was very different when she took another challenging stand, refusing in 1994 to even attend a performance of the choreographer Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here. The essay she wrote about that became and continues to be a cultural flash point, even among observers with a fairly casual relationship to the dance world. It has occasionally been suggested that prejudice of some kind shaped Croce’s resistance to Still/Here—Jones’s partner, the dancer Arnie Zane, had died of AIDS—but if anything it was her unwavering awareness of a plague that had ravaged the dance community she knew and loved that pushed her to reaffirm the freestanding nature of art, which in her view could mirror or transform tragedy but had to be more than mere transcription. Even observers inclined to agree with her about Jones’s work still sometimes wonder why she wouldn’t at least go and see Still/Here before publishing her critique. I think the answer is that Croce, after decades as a member of the audience who was willing to sit through whatever a dancer had to offer, felt she was being confronted with a kind of guerrilla theater that she could only deal with by adopting her own guerrilla tactics. Croce has rarely if ever been called a radical, but whether she said it or not, I believe she felt that Jones’s radical gesture demanded a radical response.
Writing in The New Yorker, Croce argued that Jones, by including in Still/Here videos of what she described as people “who are terminally ill and talk about it,” had “crossed the line between theatre and reality.” “In theatre,” she wrote, “one chooses what one will be.” This was the crux of her response to everything that she’d heard about Jones’s dance event. It reflected her most fundamental beliefs about the theatrical arts and art more generally, which always involve the transformation of raw experience into aesthetic experience. Croce was perfectly willing to go to the theater and witness the most agonizing scenes of pain, suffering, and death, but only with the understanding that the “realism-idealism equation” was engaged, that real life had in some way been transformed. She was insisting that art is a part of life that is in some critical way apart from life—and therefore all the more sacred. In “Multicultural Theatre,” another essay from the 1990s, she concluded, “Without the theatre, dance isn’t a medium; it’s the preserve of anthropologists, not of artists.”
You can disagree with Croce, but to do so you must argue that art is little more than a frame through which to observe the lives we’re living—or to launch theories or even polemics about the meaning of our lives. That’s the position of the social realists who dominated Soviet culture through the Stalinist years and of some in the arts community today, but Croce didn’t see it as a plausible approach for either an artist or an audience in a free society. A few months ago, when Still/Here was revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, some speculated that Croce might have changed her mind. At the time she couldn’t respond. She was in rehab, trying to recover from the stroke that eventually led to her death. What caused speculation were some remarks she had made in the introduction to her last essay collection about her struggle as she worked on the essay occasioned by Still/Here. Yet these remarks, anything but a retraction, were only a forthright writer’s account of the difficulties that literary composition entails.
I would go so far as to say that for anybody who shared Croce’s profound admiration for Balanchine, her response to Still/Here had a certain inevitability. His ballets, as she saw it, are suffused with both the personalities of his dancers and his own passions and obsessions, but all of this has been reshaped through the vitality of a creative imagination. In a passage from her later writings on Balanchine, published in Dance Index in 2023, she made precisely this point: Balanchine
didn’t use personal material. And yet every ballet of his is autobiographical, sometimes helplessly so. We sense that in some inscrutable way Balanchine is personally present. He’s everywhere, but he doesn’t block our view of things we enjoy to the point of ecstasy.
For Croce great art was in some mysterious way transparent, personality not denied so much as dispersed, infused in the matter of the medium. She was awestruck by the ability of certain dancers to become something other, much more than themselves when they were onstage, and that admiration led to some of the most important friendships of her later years, especially with Maria Calegari, Bart Cook, and Edward Villella.
What obsessed Croce more and more in her last decades—it was the central theme of the book on Balanchine she never managed to complete—was the process by which a lived experience becomes a fulfilled work of art. She wanted to dig deep into this question, moving beyond the work that had made her famous and that, in one of her late manuscripts, she referred to as the “reviewer’s Rorschach-blot readings.” In some of her later essays in The New Yorker—on the idea of the muse, on a painting by Degas, and on Balanchine’s conversation—she rejected the intricate exposition of particular performances and performers that had endeared her to readers in favor of deep dives into the myths, symbols, and persistent patterns that she believed fueled the imaginative process. Writing about Degas’s painting of the dancer Eugénie Fiocre, Croce argued that the composition included representations of the five senses and suggested, with an epigrammatic twist characteristic of her later prose, that what the late-nineteenth-century “symbolists were aiming at” was in fact “realism—actual contact with the complex life of the senses.” This was precisely the kind of paradoxical idea that came to fascinate her.
Part of the challenge Croce faced was convincing her friends and a wider audience that modern art was on an unbroken continuum not only with older art but with older mythological and symbolic ways of thinking. After her piece about Degas appeared in The New Yorker, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts wrote to complain that Degas would never have been “attracted to the hackneyed concept of the five senses.” Although Croce’s friends tended to remain silent, at least in public, I think many of them shared the feeling that her thinking was becoming overly generalized. People in the dance world pride themselves on their extraordinarily detailed knowledge of an art form that is by nature ephemeral. Croce herself had an encyclopedic familiarity with performers and performance practices, and she encouraged research into those questions when she edited Ballet Review. But she came to feel that there were bigger questions. It may be strange to say, but her ultimate commitment wasn’t necessarily to dance. Dance, her great passion, the art she responded to most completely, was for her the medium through which to understand art more generally.
“Balanchine Said,” an essay she published in The New Yorker in 2009, was mistaken by some as a mere regurgitation of quotations from the master when in fact it was a daring attempt to rethink the nature of tradition. Croce began with Balanchine’s famous comment that he was “a cloud in trousers,” which he’d borrowed from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. She then proceeded to argue that much of what Balanchine had said was based on things that others had said earlier. “Don’t think, dear, do” she credited to Paul Valéry’s “Danse, cher corps…. Ne pense pas!”
In discussing Balanchine’s attitude toward the past, Croce cited T.S. Eliot’s famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which he argued that classicism involved “an escape from personality.” This wasn’t entirely different from her ideas about Balanchine’s classicism, but her emphasis on the choreographer’s conversation helps us better understand his relationship with the past. While Eliot believed that the artist couldn’t reach the “impersonality” at the heart of tradition “without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done,” Croce suggested that for Balanchine the revitalization of tradition involved personalizing the past, bringing one’s own stresses and accents to older values and ideas: “As a quotationist, he frequently succeeded in obliterating the ‘originator’ of the quote.” A living tradition necessitated saying things again, but in your own voice, the old thing in the new voice becoming altogether new. Balanchine “recycled verbal nuggets,” she wrote, “in the same spirit in which he revivified the art of ballet.”
Croce retired from regular reviewing at The New Yorker in 1996 so she could devote all her energies to her book about Balanchine’s ballets. The years passed, and the book didn’t appear. I’ve heard it said that the problem was that Croce was an essay writer, not a book writer. But a few years ago, when she allowed me to see parts of the manuscript—and since her death I’ve seen more—I came to believe that the problem wasn’t so much that she couldn’t produce an extended work of prose but that everything she was learning was pushing her toward a philosophical and sometimes even hermetic way of writing that involved reimagining her already fully formed literary style. In the hundreds of pages—some containing only a sentence or two—that she left at her death, I believe there’s much that should see the light of day. Some will dismiss this work as cloudy, but before doing so they might remember that her subject was a man who said he was a cloud in trousers.
Croce doesn’t so much state as suggest. Here are a few of these allusive observations. Their power has everything to do with provoking further thought:
Even if they do not enact a story, [Balanchine’s] dancers inhabit a story-world.
As a spectacle, ballet’s Renaissance beauty of proportion is enhanced by the continual defiance of gravity—the force that shapes the cosmos. Thus ballet’s appeal has about it a kind of cosmic heroism. This is repeatedly demonstrated in Balanchine’s work—think of the finale of his Swan Lake.
Dance: the art that names nothing and says everything.
No greater exponent of Horace’s “utile dulci”—poetic sweetness and useful truth—existed than Balanchine. His dances pleasured and instructed audiences as well as dancers.
[Balanchine’s repertory] was from one standpoint a philosophical discourse on ballet, on its merits as both popular entertainment and cultivated art form, on its range of styles and periods, and on its origins—most especially on its origins.
There is no more methodology to dancing [Balanchine] than there is to playing Bach.
The task of the Balanchine scholar is much the same as that of the Leonardo scholar: the deterioration and mutilation of the work make speculation and second-guessing inevitable.
During a visit with Arlene a couple of years ago I mentioned that I’d been reading Katherine Anne Porter, not realizing that Porter was one of the writers she admired most. She told me that in 1952 she’d heard Porter speak at the women’s college she was attending in North Carolina; a treasured possession was a volume the writer had inscribed to her. Arlene had high praise for Porter’s collected letters, which I hadn’t read and which are indeed a kind of masterpiece. Then our talk turned to Ship of Fools, the long novel that Porter worked on for decades. When it finally appeared it became a huge best seller, although many of Porter’s admirers believed and still believe it’s among her weakest work. When I mentioned the widespread criticism of Ship of Fools, Arlene jumped in to disagree. She regarded Ship of Fools as a major achievement. Days later it occurred to me that she might have seen Porter’s endless labors on what many considered an unfinishable project as the model for her own.
Once, when asked about the state of the Balanchine book, Croce said it was “done but not finished.” In the arts nothing can ever really be finished, at least not if tradition has any chance of remaining alive. In one of her last essays about the collapse of New York City Ballet, Croce worried that classical ballet couldn’t “survive the contradictions of stasis and stale imitation.” Her work was never static, never stale.
English (US) · 