Arlene Croce Elevated Dance Criticism With Style and Daring

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.