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Arlene Croce
Arlene Croce
Arlene Croce
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Arlene Louise Croce (/ˈkroʊtʃiː/; May 5, 1934 – December 16, 2024) was an American dance critic. She co-founded Ballet Review magazine in 1965 and served as its first editor. From 1973 to 1996 she was a dance critic for The New Yorker magazine.

Key Information

Background

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Croce was born to an Italian-American family in Providence, Rhode Island, on May 5, 1934.[1] She later grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, after her family moved there, and studied at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, before graduating from New York's Barnard College in 1955.[1][2]

Career

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Prior to Croce's long career as a dance writer, she also wrote film criticism for Film Culture and other magazines. In 1965, she was one of the founders of Ballet Review.[2] She joined The New Yorker in 1973.[1] The keynote of her criticism can be grasped from her ability to evoke kinesthetic movement and expressive images in her writing.[citation needed] Although she considered ballet to epitomize the highest form of dance, she also wrote extensively on the topic of popular and filmed dance, and was a recognized authority on the Astaire and Rogers musical films.

In 1994, she courted controversy with her stance on Bill T. Jones's Still/Here, a work about terminal illness. In an article called "Discussing the Undiscussable",[3] she dubbed the work "victim art" and refused to attend any performances, claiming that it was "unreviewable" because Jones featured commentary from actual terminal patients in the performance.[1] The article became highly controversial, with numerous writers and artists publicly defending or rebuking Croce.[2] The article was reprinted in her 2000 book, Writing in the Dark.

Her writings on dance are available in several books, and a sampling of her film criticism can be found in the anthology American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now.

Death

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Croce died from complications of a stroke at a care facility in Johnston, Rhode Island, on December 16, 2024, at age 90.[1][2]

Bibliography

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References

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Arlene Croce

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Arlene Croce (October 20, 1934 – December 16, 2024) was an American dance critic known for her influential and authoritative contributions to dance journalism, particularly through her role as The New Yorker's dance critic from 1973 to 1998, a position created specifically for her. Widely regarded as both the most revered and most feared dance writer in the United States, she earned acclaim for her biting wit, intellectual rigor, and passionate defense of classical ballet while offering forthright assessments of contemporary dance. Croce founded Ballet Review magazine in 1965 and served as its first editor, helping to establish a serious platform for dance scholarship and criticism. Her essays and reviews, often characterized by their literary quality and sharp insight, elevated dance to a prominent place in cultural discourse and influenced generations of critics and readers. Collections of her work, including Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker, captured her distinctive voice and enduring impact on the field. She died on December 16, 2024, at the age of 90.

Early Life and Education

Family background and childhood

Arlene Croce was born on May 5, 1934, in Providence, Rhode Island, to Italian-American parents Michael and Louise (Pensa) Croce. Her father worked as a floor manager in a textile mill, and she was the oldest of three children. During her childhood, the family relocated to North Carolina. Croce never took formal lessons in dance or music.

Education and early interests

Arlene Croce attended the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for two years before transferring to Barnard College in New York City. She graduated from Barnard in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. In her senior year, she became the first recipient of the Elizabeth Janeway Prize for Prose Writing, a $500 award established that year by novelist Elizabeth Janeway and presented at the annual honors assembly. While studying English at Barnard, Croce read and was influenced by the literary critics R. P. Blackmur, F. R. Leavis, and Lionel Trilling. Her early passion was for film as an art form, which preceded her later focus on dance; she spent long periods attending cinemas in New York City. Croce had no formal dance training and described herself as a "dance illiterate," explaining that she had never formally studied dance or taken music lessons.

Early Career

Film criticism

Arlene Croce began her professional writing career in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a film critic, contributing reviews to specialized journals and other outlets. In 1959, she reviewed Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali and Aparajito for Film Culture, offering an analysis that was later anthologized by Phillip Lopate in his collection of American movie criticism. Her 1960 review of François Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows appeared in Film Quarterly, where she described the film's construction as "very nearly as absolutely visual as that of a silent film" and argued that it conveyed its theme of freedom through imagery alone, potentially intelligible even to "an audience of deaf illiterates in any part of the world." During the 1960s, William F. Buckley Jr. recruited Croce to serve as a writer and editor at National Review, where she published film reviews alongside other notable contributors; these pieces were not included in her later collected works. Her early film criticism reflected a particular interest in Hollywood musicals, especially those starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, whose screen performances she had admired since childhood and which shaped her attention to cinematic movement and dance-like elements on film. This foundation in film writing preceded her shift toward dance criticism in the mid-1960s.

Founding and editorship of Ballet Review

In 1965, Arlene Croce co-founded Ballet Review with David Vaughan and Robert Cornfield, serving as the journal's first editor. Puzzled by the absence of a seriously critical dance magazine in the United States, she initiated the publication, which she initially edited and assembled at her kitchen table in New York. Early issues featured an innovative grading grid in which contributors scored new dance works on a scale from A+ to F-, with choreographer and designer James Waring and Peter Anastos among the notable participants. The journal reflected Croce's distinctive editorial sensibility, combining rigorous intellectual inquiry with a provocative streak of mischief that set it apart from more earnest contemporary dance periodicals. Her work on Ballet Review established Croce as a formidable voice in dance criticism. This early endeavor contributed to her growing recognition in the field.

The New Yorker Years

Appointment and tenure

Arlene Croce was appointed dance critic of The New Yorker in 1973 by editor William Shawn, who created the position specifically for her. This appointment came after she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 that supported her dance research and writing leading into the role. Shawn invented the "Dancing" column expressly for Croce, granting her considerable editorial freedom to select subjects and set deadlines without assignments or interference. She wrote the "Dancing" column from 1973 to 1996, covering a wide spectrum of dance including ballet, modern dance, tap, popular dance, and filmed dance. Her work during this 23-year tenure resulted in four major collections of her New Yorker pieces. Her position ended in 1996, shortly after the controversy surrounding her 1994 essay "Discussing the Undiscussable," after which she published infrequently in the magazine.

Key reviews and subjects

During her tenure at The New Yorker, Arlene Croce devoted much of her criticism to the work of George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet, treating them as the pinnacle of classical dance achievement. She paid particular attention to ballerina Suzanne Farrell, whose performance in Balanchine's Diamonds (from Jewels) she described as depicting "the freest woman alive," emphasizing Farrell's off-center balances, risk-taking style, and minimal reliance on her partner as signs of unprecedented autonomy and security. Croce also championed several modern dance figures, including Paul Taylor, whose Esplanade (set to Bach) she hailed as "a classic of American dance" for its pristine beauty, elementary drive, and democratic appeal, achieved through twenty-eight minutes of movement without traditional dance steps. She admired Merce Cunningham for the virtuosic articulation and nuance in his choreography and dancing, noting its nonconsequential structure yet profound absorption. Croce supported early Twyla Tharp and later endorsed Mark Morris, praising his "raw gift of choreography" in a 1984 essay as offering a sanctuary for sincere theatrical expression. She covered tap dance extensively, reviewing performers such as Gail Conrad's Tap Dance Theatre and admiring Baby Laurence for his complicated rhythms that appealed to musicians and fellow tap dancers. Croce also wrote on Jerome Robbins, Antony Tudor, and Martha Graham, situating them within the broader landscape of ballet and modern dance influences. Among her more controversial writings was the 1994 essay "Discussing the Undiscussable," in which she declined to review Bill T. Jones's mixed-media work Still/Here (incorporating testimony from terminally ill individuals), describing it as an example of "victim art" that rendered it beyond the reach of criticism and sparked widespread debate in the dance and arts communities. Among her lighter contributions were humorous pieces, including the 1979 column "Ballet Alert," a fictitious telephone service for hyperactive balletomanes that parodied The New Yorker's Talk of the Town format. Many of these reviews and essays from her New Yorker years were later collected in published volumes.

Published Works

Books collecting criticism

Arlene Croce compiled her dance and film criticism into several influential books, beginning with a work that bridged popular culture and performance analysis. Her first book, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (1972), expanded an earlier article with support from a Guggenheim fellowship and provided a history and assessment of the Astaire-Rogers musical films, primarily from the 1930s. Newsweek described it as “the best study in popular culture ever written.” She followed with Afterimages (1977), her first collection of reviews and essays, spanning her work from 1966 to 1977. Lincoln Kirstein judged it “the most reliable chronicle of theatrical dancing in the United States” during the covered period. Subsequent collections continued to gather her incisive pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere. Going to the Dance appeared in 1982, followed by Sight Lines in 1987. Her culminating volume, Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker (2000), served as the final major collection of her criticism. In its preface, she reflected on the extraordinary dance scene of the 1970s and 1980s, observing that its richness, variety, and plenitude “now seems a miracle.”

Selected essays and later writings

Arlene Croce's later writings include several notable standalone essays and contributions that appeared after her main period of regular publication in The New Yorker. One of her most prominent individual essays is "Discussing the Undiscussable," published in the December 26, 1994, issue of The New Yorker, where she reflected on the evolving challenges of dance criticism in relation to certain contemporary performance works. In 2016, Croce wrote a review essay for The New York Review of Books titled "The Rhythm Boys," examining two histories of tap dance: Megan Pugh's America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk and Brian Seibert's What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing. She also contributed several of her earlier film reviews to the 2006 anthology American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents to Now, edited by Phillip Lopate and published by the Library of America. Additionally, a book on George Balanchine that Croce contracted to write in 1986 remained unpublished in full during her lifetime, though excerpts from the manuscript appeared in 2023 in Dance Index.

Critical Approach and Views

Writing style and methodology

Arlene Croce was celebrated for her biting wit, elegant yet slangy prose, and precise, merciless descriptions that could be wicked in their acuity. Pauline Kael described her as “a slangy, elegant writer” whose compressed descriptions were “evocative and analytic at the same time, and so precise and fresh.” Her criticism combined stunning insights with unrelenting determination to articulate what she had seen, employing clarity, imagination, and intellectual rigor to elevate dance writing. Central to Croce's methodology was her practice of writing from the "afterimage" of a performance—the personal, partial impression imprinted in her mind after the event, rather than a verbatim record. She wrote in the heat of immediate memory, fully aware of the subjective and ephemeral nature of capturing an impermanent art form, yet presented her observations with confidence for the reader's benefit. This approach acknowledged the inherent limitations of dance criticism while committing to rigorous analysis that treated dance as a serious intellectual subject deserving the same standards as other arts. Croce rejected hype, fashion, and overinflated reputations, consistently championing dance that was "about itself," rooted in classicism and musical responsiveness rather than trend-driven agendas. She described the act of writing dance criticism as a "fool’s errand" given the challenges of the medium, yet maintained that it achieved its purpose when it evoked a shared experience, allowing at least one reader to recognize “Yes, it was like that for me too.” Her method thus balanced fierce analytical precision with an acceptance of partiality, aiming to contribute meaningfully to cultural conversation through powerful, disciplined prose.

Admired artists and works

Arlene Croce held George Balanchine in the highest esteem, describing his death in 1983 as having reduced the cultural vitality of New York by half. She particularly admired the dancers of New York City Ballet, with Suzanne Farrell emerging as one of her most frequently praised performers for her technical brilliance and interpretive depth. Croce devoted an entire book to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, titled The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (1972), in which she celebrated their partnership as a pinnacle of American popular dance and cinematic artistry. Her admiration also encompassed several modern and contemporary choreographers, including Paul Taylor for his musicality and dramatic range, Merce Cunningham for his innovative exploration of movement and chance, the early work of Twyla Tharp for its wit and vernacular energy, and Mark Morris for his inventive musicality and ensemble craftsmanship. Tap dance was one of Croce's passions, and she singled out Baby Laurence as a tap master who ventured into radical territory. These enthusiasms appeared in her New Yorker reviews. Arlene Croce consistently critiqued postmodern dance and related experimental trends, viewing them as largely unproductive outgrowths of 1960s cultural rebellion. She dismissed most of postmodernism outright, writing that "the rebellion of the sixties" had yielded "no results that were interesting." Her disapproval extended to specific choreographers she saw as emblematic of these trends. She described the work of Pina Bausch as enshrining "the amateur’s faith in psychopathy as drama." Croce also sharply criticized developments at the New York City Ballet after George Balanchine's death, particularly under Peter Martins' direction. She wrote in 1993 that "the ballets have had their hearts torn out" and that "the ruin is all but complete." Throughout her career, she resisted emerging tendencies toward what she called "victim art" and the permissive thinking derived from the 1960s. She notably articulated this view in her 1994 New Yorker essay "Discussing the Undiscussable," where she declined to review Bill T. Jones' Still/Here, describing it as beyond the reach of criticism due to its framing as victim art.

Notable Controversy

"Discussing the Undiscussable" essay

Arlene Croce's controversial essay "Discussing the Undiscussable" was published in The New Yorker on December 26, 1994. In the piece, Croce explicitly stated that she had not seen Bill T. Jones's dance-theater work Still/Here and had no intention of attending or reviewing it. Still/Here was a mixed-media performance that integrated videotaped testimony from participants in Jones's "Survival Workshops," individuals confronting life-threatening illnesses, alongside dance and other elements. Croce coined the term "victim art" to categorize Still/Here and similar works that, in her view, centered the real suffering and terminal conditions of their subjects and creator in a way that placed the piece beyond the reach of legitimate aesthetic criticism. She argued that negative judgment of such art would inevitably appear as an attack on the victims themselves, rendering it undiscussable. Croce portrayed Jones as presenting himself simultaneously as "victim and martyr" through the work's focus on his own and others' documented illnesses. She situated this phenomenon within broader cultural trends, attributing it to permissive thinking originating in the 1960s and to the institutional support of the arts bureaucracy, which she believed enabled and protected such works from conventional critical scrutiny. The essay was later reprinted in Croce's collection Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker (2000).

Reception and cultural impact

**The publication of Arlene Croce's "Discussing the Undiscussable" in The New Yorker in December 1994 ignited widespread controversy that quickly extended beyond dance circles into a major flashpoint of the 1990s culture wars. The essay provoked intense debate over the boundaries of criticism, the role of identity and suffering in art, and whether certain works could legitimately place themselves beyond aesthetic judgment. Reactions divided sharply along ideological lines, with prominent figures such as bell hooks condemning the piece as an "awesome flaunting of privilege" that embodied right-wing values, and Tony Kushner asserting that the choreographer had prevailed while Croce "Never/Arrived." At the same time, the essay garnered support from defenders of critical independence, including Camille Paglia, who praised it for exposing "P.C. dinosaurs" hostile to aesthetic standards, as well as Hilton Kramer and Midge Decter, who endorsed Croce's resistance to moral claims overriding artistic evaluation. The resulting exchanges, covered extensively in outlets such as The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The New Criterion, positioned the episode as a defining confrontation between traditional criticism and the growing influence of identity politics and victimhood narratives in the arts. The controversy became a lasting reference point in discussions of reviewability, the autonomy of criticism, and the legitimacy of extra-artistic pressures on aesthetic judgment. It reflected Croce's consistent stance against claims that personal or social circumstances should exempt works from critical scrutiny. Decades later, the essay continues to shadow reception of related works and artists, with some critics still drawing on its framework while others urge moving beyond it. As part of Croce's legacy, it underscored her reputation as a fearless proponent of independent critical judgment.

Personal Life and Death

Legacy

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