Word: croce
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Cunningham is himself a dancer of extraordinary subtlety and power--"he really does seem to have more in his little finger than most dancers have in their whole bodies," the New Yorker's Arlene Croce has remarked--and the movement of his dances, radiating from a center of balance in the lower spine, demands a firm technique. Despite the disjunction between music and dance, another key component of Cunningham style is rhythm. But as former dancer Brown explains, "Merce requires...that the rhythm come from within: from the nature of the step, from the nature of the phrase, and from...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...