Word: croce
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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LAST WINTER DANCE CRITIC Arlene Croce wrote a controversial essay for the New Yorker in which she discussed choreographer Bill T. Jones' production Still/Here without having seen it. She justified her unorthodox move by claiming she didn't have to sit through the piece, a treatise on aids and other terminal illnesses, to know what she was going to get--a lot of easy emotionalism. Certain kinds of art, literature and film, Croce argued, are too manipulative to be judged objectively, too predictable, essentially, to be bothered with...
Confronted with the task of reviewing The End of Alice (Scribner; 270 pages; $22), the third novel by A.M. Homes, a critic certainly feels the impulse to pull a Croce. Why actually wade through the book when we know from the publicity what we're in for: a story that demands to disturb and repulse, a portrait of a sick mind filled with sexual imagery repellent enough to make Robert Mapplethorpe photos look like Tommy Hilfiger ads by comparison...
Bill T. Jones is not crossing the lines of reality and theater in Still/Here, as New Yorker dance reviewer Arlene Croce complained in her criticism of the piece, unseen by her [Culture, Feb. 6]. The theater is usually a reflection of reality. Maybe this reflection is too close to the surface for Croce. By including in his work people who are suffering from AIDS, Jones is being honest about his themes. Isn't it often said, ``Write about what you know''? People should, by that logic, dance and talk about what they know. The people involved in the piece...
...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...
...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...