PUSH COMES TO SHOVE

By Martha Duffy

The phones and faxes are buzzing around the cultural corridors of the Northeast. The bills mount as egos read to patient friends the latest draft of angry letters to the editor. Opposing sides, each consisting of trusty comrades, have lined up and fired. The salvo: You're wrong-and not only that, you're morally wrong.

If Washington plays the naked power game, if Los Angeles spices power ploys with glitz, New York City energizes itself with a workout borrowed from academia: the intellectual war game, clarifying issues by talking them to death. The current fracas is the biggest since the obscenity debate over Robert Mapplethorpe's photography. It pits one of the country's most brilliant and respected critics against one of its most daring and respected choreographers. Arlene Croce is the New Yorker's dance reviewer; no American arts critic is more admired-or more feared. Bill T. Jones is a modern-dance choreographer; handsome and outspoken, he has always drawn extreme love-him-or-hate-him reactions.

The subject at hand is Jones' new work Still/Here, now on a national tour (Seattle this week; after that Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles, among others). It is based on a series of "survival workshops" that Jones, who is hiv positive, held around the country. The participants, who were dying or direly ill, were videotaped talking about their pain, their anxieties and their hopes. During Still/Here, the tapes are played on screens while Jones' company dances in front of them.

Jones' concert, as he calls it, opened a new front in the continuing culture wars. In the year-end issue of the New Yorker, Croce wrote a piece, titled Discussing the Undiscussable, in which she declared that she would not review Still/Here-would not even see it-because she considered the show beyond the reach of criticism: "The cast members of Still/Here-the sick people whom Jones has signed up-have no choice other than to be sick." By presenting them on videotape, she reasoned, the choreographer has "crossed the line between theatre and reality. I can't review someone I feel sorry for or hopeless about." More generally, Croce decried "victim art," art that forces the viewer to pity "dissed blacks, abused women or disenfranchised homosexuals."

Jones made no formal reply. He didn't have to. Critics, journalists, cultural commentators of all sorts, many of whom haven't been to a ballet or a modern-dance concert in years, reached for the sword. Most took Croce to task for not seeing the work (though, of course, if she had not made the provocative gesture of writing about a work she refused to see, her piece would have lost some of its eclat). New York Times columnist Frank Rich laid down the lines of the dialogue on the op-ed page. "aids is responsible for yanking death out of the American closet," he wrote. "This is the story of our time. Amazingly, Ms. Croce missed it."

Village Voice executive editor Richard Goldstein put Croce "under the aegis of the Great Newt, [where] a traditionalist may safely rage against the rise of minorities." Conservative art critic Hilton Kramer saw things differently, calling the piece "the most definitive essay on the arts in the 1990s that any American critic has yet written ... a landmark in the cultural history of our era."

Last week's issue of the New Yorker kept the pot bubbling by printing a dozen letters, several solicited, from cultural pillars of various persuasions. Tony Kushner, author of the Pulitzer-prizewinning Angels in America, said he felt "dissed." Croce, he argued, has her semantics wrong; she uses the word victims to describe "politically engaged progressive people." Libertarian terror Camille Paglia largely agreed with Croce but seized the occasion to chide her for not paying proper attention to the pop heroes Paglia champions. In short, the powwow was predictable but entertaining.

There are several reasons why the piece became combustible. For one, the New Yorker under editor Tina Brown has developed a knack for getting itself talked about, and this piece was placed up front in the issue, not back in the critical ghetto. For another, the article was well timed. Croce used it to deplore what she considers the politicization of National Endowment for the Arts grants and the effects of political correctness on the arts in general. To Croce, a conservative, a work of art should be judged by its realization of truth and beauty, not its adaptability to an agenda. Coming just when Newt and Co. are threatening to zero out federal arts funding, the piece was a lightning rod in the arts community.

Croce, of course, insists that her essay was occasioned only by the Still/Here tour, but both she and Jones are conscious of political influences at work in the controversy. "This is really a little scuffle," Jones told Time, "but I wonder about the winds blowing around in the country-whether there isn't a plan of retrenchment we can't even see." As for Croce, she was disgusted that "some of the angriest responses have come from people who think the Republican victory emboldened me to write this. I have been thinking about Bill T. Jones for years now."

To anyone interested in dance, Croce's ability to inflame does not come as a surprise. For the past 22 years at the New Yorker, she has written stringent criticisms that though models of logic and clarity, can also sting. A devotae of George Balanchine, whose biography she is writing, she has unmercifully chastised Peter Martins, his successor as artistic director of the New York City Ballet, when she felt he was flouting the master's style. Her judgments have resonated through the ballet world.

Jones' love of dance began with what he calls "the mysteries of Martha Graham." In 1971 he met dancer Arnie Zane, and together they founded what might be called the modern school of exuberance and explosion. Zane died of aids in 1988. Jones sees his work now not as mourning but as an exploration of what he and Zane once produced together.

For Croce, her essay is nothing if not a declaration of independence from victim art. Some of her supporters have pointed out that feelings of pity or guilt can be used by artists as a bribe, just as an unearned emotion of political solidarity was often used in the 1930s. But novelist Reynolds Price, who has survived spinal cancer and last year published an acclaimed memoir about his experience (A Whole New Life), wonders if Still/Here represents a new body of art that will be increasingly hard to ignore. "There are a tremendous number of people who survive in ways that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago."

Is Still/Here a hospital visit instead of a work of art? Does the real-life pathos of the videotapes overwhelm any possible aesthetic response by the audience? Jones doesn't think so. He feels that people know they're watching dance and not documentary. "When I go to talk sessions after my performances," he says, "people want to know about specifics. They want to know about the history of modern dance."

-With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland and Hannah Bloch/New York

With reporting by ELIZABETH L. BLAND AND HANNAH BLOCH/ NEW YORK