WRITING IN THE DARK, DANCING IN THE NEW YORKER

This scintillating collection, comprising 109 of Croce’s dance essays and reviews published in the New Yorker during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, presents a riveting three-decade panorama of Amerca’s love affair with the terpsichorean arts.

Croce credits Merce Cunningham with the famous line that speaking about dance is like nailing Jell-o to the wall, but she easily proves that her critical writing can meet that demanding standard. Her prose is light and feathery in its contours, yet exacting and precise in its analysis. From the early days of Mikhail Baryshnikov to the waning years of Martha Graham, with everyone and every dance imaginable in between and beyond, Croce’s reviews capture with snapshot clarity and permanence the most ephemeral of arts; although dance may be as intangible as a beautiful movement in a moment, her essays reveal themselves to be timeless pieces of amber surrounding the memory of a triumphant (or sometimes a failed) evening of motion. With devastating precision through the chronological progression of her writings, Croce asserts that dance’s last great year was 1989 and that the 1990s have witnessed a decline in the beauty and significance of dance due to the emergence of “victim art,” which frees itself from the exigencies of criticism due to its appeal to pathos. Many of the essays here previously appeared in the earlier collections Afterimages (1977), Going to the Dance (1982), and Sight Lines (1987); since all three are now out of print, this is a most welcome omnibus edition.

In one of her more controversial essays, “Discussing the Undiscussable,” Croce declares, “Theoretically, I am ready to go to anything once. If it moves, I’m interested; if it moves to music, I’m in love.” The library of anyone who shares this view is incomplete without her book.