Arlene Croce, who died last week at 90, made dance as important in arts criticism as painting, music, theater and books. The New Yorker’s dance critic from 1973 to 1996, Croce amassed a cult following and not a few detractors. She was also, despite insular origins, one of the most daring and stylish critics in the American canon.
In the 1970s, a dance boom hit New York City, and The New Yorker created its first-ever dance critic slot, filling it with a 40-year-old editor and film critic plucked from small-magazine obscurity: Croce.
But Croce wasn’t created by the dance boom. She created herself, through a stubborn, private, almost secret ambition, and a sort of homemade feminism that morphed into an Olympian credo about art. She believed in beauty. And she believed that a mix of virtuosity and classicism — she loved that word — lifted you out of the reach of messy human emotions.
She was born into a large, extended Italian American working-class family in Providence, R.I., that rose to the middle class as her father, a textile mill manager, followed the industry to North Carolina. While displaced, the Croces retained their rituals (stuffed shells for special occasions) and wry speech rhythms, which Arlene absorbed even as she ventured beyond the family.
Her first epiphany, she told me once, came from an after-school program that took children to the movies to watch Disney cartoons. She noticed that the college-age chaperones reacted differently from the kids: They weren’t just laughing, they were analyzing.
Other epiphanies followed. Just out of Barnard, she was physiologically shaken, she said in a 1979 interview in Vogue, by the premiere of George Balanchine’s “Agon” in 1957. She was similarly moved by a retrospective of the 1930s Astaire-Rogers films at the Museum of Modern Art.
Film and dance merged in her perceptions. She became an Astaire-Rogers “fan” (her term for herself), and in 1972, she wrote “The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book.” It caught the notice of The New Yorker’s movie critic, Pauline Kael, who offered a template for a vividly subjective critical style (and eventually helped Croce onto The New Yorker staff). And somewhere in there came Croce’s conversion from the left-populist Roman Catholicism of Dorothy Day to the right-wing politics of William Buckley, on whose National Review she worked as an editor.
In 1965, Croce founded, with Edward Gorey and Robert Cornfield, the small magazine Ballet Review, the only serious magazine in the United States to address dance. (It folded in 2020.)
I was one of the young writers brought into Ballet Review’s orbit, through Croce’s constant need to fill the magazine and keep the dance conversation going. Others in that orbit — it was actually more like an entourage, or a court, with the usual jostling for notice — were Robert Greskovic, Don Daniels, Mindy Aloff, Joan Acocella, Claudia Roth Pierpont and Alastair Macaulay, all of whom became distinguished critics in their own right. (Macaulay was The New York Times dance critic from 2007 to 2018.)
Croce educated us, or at least me, into the belief that writing about one art meant engaging with all the arts. She sent me to Eugene O’Neill plays on Broadway; to film retrospectives at MoMA, including a 1975 D.W. Griffith festival. As payment for my first Ballet Review article, she gave me the two-LP set of Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, apologizing that it wasn’t money. She loved, and talked about, cultural artifacts as different as Louis Armstrong’s songs and French New Wave cinema, Beethoven string quartets and designer clothes.
We went shopping. She once pressed me so hard to buy a Geoffrey Beene suit on sale (beige jacket, beige tweed skirt, forest-green satin blouse) that I succumbed, violating my slender budget.
Croce, with her tweed skirts, her trim Italian shoes, her coifed black hair, small red lips and urban drawl, was a city creature through and through. It was as if her taste had been formed in that Lisa Fonssagrives 1950s moment of ultra-detached chic, tempered by Hollywood’s sartorial prescription for working female journalists.
It wasn’t quite real, her world; it was modern and antiquated both. It didn’t have any place, for instance, for contemporary caution about body shaming. She was called to task several times for borderline-cruel, even borderline-racist, descriptions of dancer’s bodies. Nor could she seem to deal with the emotions surrounding the AIDS crisis. In 1994, Croce was widely criticized for condemning Bill T. Jones’s piece about terminally ill people, “Still/Here,” without attending a performance (she called it “victim art”).
Nevertheless, Croce drew readers in — she does still — by her seemingly casual deployment of a devastating wit. One line I remember especially, because reading it on a hot summer day in 1974 on a bench at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, convinced me I was in the right profession. Croce was describing the new (and short-lived) Harkness Theater on 62nd and Broadway, bought and outfitted by the oil heiress Rebekah Harkness for her Harkness Ballet. After noting the semi-pornographic murals framing the stage and its negligee-style, nylon apricot curtain, she took a swipe at the repertory: “And when that curtain rises, it is, indeed, indecent exposure.”
But it isn’t just the wit you admire in Croce’s reviews. It’s the overall prose rhythms: the long sentences followed by short clinchers. The clauses so calibrated they need no commas. The compressed descriptions that don’t crowd the reader. The word choice: surgical, precise, kinetic. She wielded verbs and adverbs to enhance the precision, while imperceptibly zooming out to a wider field of reference — philosophy, religion, idealism.
Take this 1974 description of the newly formed, all-male Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (still performing today). After noting that only two could dance on pointe, she tells us that “the rest of the company totter, gallop, or bourrée in a flat-footed scuffle through the scene, or else lumpily decorate it in poses.” Then she lobs in a compliment: “Although they do what they do brutally, they never do it sloppily.”
The descriptions prepare the reader for what Croce believes. Ballet, she writes, is “a world of signs and designs”: that is, a language complete in itself that operates in parallel with the ones we speak or gesture in. “Ballet is fantasy, true,” she concludes, “but even when it is erotic fantasy, its transfigured realism reorders the sensations that flow from physical acts, and our perceptions change accordingly. The arabesque is real, the leg is not.”
It is clear from Croce’s writing that she revered Balanchine above all other choreographers, for his clarity about the language; for his belief that art should be separate from life, the better to mirror it.
But even Balanchine wasn’t let off Croce’s critical hook: She was never, contrary to her own description, just a fan. The ballet “Chaconne” in its 1976 premiere looked unfinished, “two-sided,” because it imperfectly yoked together earlier choreography with new passages for its principal dancers. “What happens in the middle of ‘Chaconne,’” she wrote, “is that a whole new ballet crystallizes.”
Then, a week after the premiere, another “Chaconne” performance changed her mind. The dancers had settled in, finding the classicism, the inner harmony, that Croce was always looking for. “There was such euphoria onstage and in the pit,” she wrote, “that the final chaconne, loose ends and all, came together and held as if by miracle, and stars, demis, corps, orchestra, and audience were wafted together into Tiepolo skies.”
Ah, those Tiepolo skies. They must be her idea of heaven.
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