Dance Spell

By Martha Duffy

AFTERIMAGES

by Arlene Croce

Knopf; 466 pages; $12.95

The line between reviewing and criticism is a smudged one, but Arlene Croce's dance column in The New Yorker falls into the latter category as easily as Randall Jarrell's poetry chronicle or James Agee's film commentary in the '40s. The dance world can very well use her learning and passionate commitment--and even her occasional irritability.

Ballet has exploded in popularity during the past ten or 15 years. There are more challenges for choreographers and performers than ever, and some big money. Even Hollywood is paying attention. Taken together, the pieces collected in Afterimages from The New Yorker and other magazines raise the voice of a dedicated but exacting lover of the art who is worried about its function.

Croce wears her knowledge easily, but it comes from time lavished in the theater with the prodigality of a monk in his chapel. Critical scale in dance can be acquired only by watching every possible performance--every last Giselle, however badly miscast, any tentative choreographer who can get a pickup company together for a few evenings in a church basement. Years of such observation inform Croce's asides about dancers. Of Suzanne Farrell's second performance in Bournonville Divertissements, she writes: "She was less noticeably nervous (she'd stopped bouncing her wrists, an infallible sign)." Of Edward Villella in Pulcinella: "He goes through the piece like a speeding crab, as loose as Groucho." Of Nureyev in Le Corsaire: "At the end ... he slams himself to the floor at the ballerina's feet and yearns upward from the small of his back. No one else does it so well." One is ready to go out at once and see Nureyev in this weary old war horse.

Such verbal snapshots form the documentation for Croce's broader, harder judgments, particularly on fads that have parasitically grown with the popularity of ballet. "Reviewing should function like a Food and Drug Administration," she notes, "even if that function is largely futile." What she calls "pop ballet" is a particular target: "Whole repertories (the Stuttgart Ballet) or parts of repertories (the Jeffrey, the Ailey) devoted to slick approximations of the higher article." In an essay called "Selling It," she has very harsh words for the American Ballet Theater, which she accuses of merchandising stars in shoddy productions while neglecting the growth of the company.

Croce began watching the New York City Ballet when she was a student at Barnard. In addition to writing the New Yorker column, she is editor of the quarterly Ballet Review. Her standards can be formidably high. What does she like? Certain words recur: clarity (for Gelsey Kirkland), purity (for Baryshnikov), amplitude (for Farrell and Peter Martins). If Croce's criticism has a godfather, it is George Balanchine, who, after all, reinvented classical ballet and made it American. If she has an idol among dancers, it is Baryshnikov, though she thinks that A.B.T. misuses his genius.

But there are many others. In 1973 she attended the World's Professional Ballroom Dancing Championships and discovered Richard and Janet Gleave, a British couple who won the Modern competition. Her admiring chapter on the drag ballet troupe, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, is also a witty essay on sexual stereotypes. Perhaps even more than Balanchine, she loves Fred Astaire. A passage describing his partnership with Ginger Rogers could stand as well for Croce's writing about dance: "Passion--the missing element in just about every 'sexy' duet that has been attempted since-- is usually confused with emoting or going primitive. With Astaire and Rogers, it's a matter of total professional dedication; they do not give us emotions, they give us dances, and the more beautifully they dance, the more powerful the spell." --Martha Duffy

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