The New Yorker:
With her writing for The New Yorker, Croce put dance criticism and dance itself on the cultural map.
By Jennifer Homans
Arlene Croce, who wrote the Dancing column in The New Yorkerfrom 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.
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