Dance Criticism

Afterimages.
by Arlene Croce.
Knopf. 480 pp. $12.95.

There is general awareness that special powers are involved in, and required for, the composing of a sonata, the performing of that sonata, the writing of a play, the acting in that play, the choreographing of a ballet, the dancing in that ballet. But there is no general awareness that such special powers are involved in, and required for, the critical writing about those artistic activities—that the critic is the professional viewer or listener endowed, supposedly, with special powers of perception and judgment, the exercise of which in his review makes it possible for his nonprofessional readers to perceive what otherwise they might miss. I say “supposedly endowed” because in the actual critical writing I have encountered in the past fifty years I have found the special powers of the critic to be even rarer than those of the artists whose work he writes about. No one else has written anything like the reviews and essays of Stark Young collected in Immortal Shadows (1948), which reported what his eye and ear perceived in the works of theater art placed before him; and until recently this was true also of the writing on dance by Edwin Denby collected in Looking at the Dance (1948). But in dance criticism there was a change with the appearance—first, in 1966, in a new quarterly, Ballet Review (New York), then also in the Dancing Times (London), and since 1973 in the New Yorker—of writing by Arlene Croce that revealed her as someone, in the field of dance, with the rare gift of the critic’s perceptive eye.

This gift made her writing, like Denby’s, valuable not only for the illumination it provided with its accurate perceptions and evaluations, but for the correction it provided of other writers’ errors. Denby’s description in the New York Herald Tribune of the extraordinary things there were to see in a Balanchine ballet corrected John Martin’s disparaging comment in the New York Times that made it out to be not worth seeing. And so with Croce’s comments on Balanchine’s Who Cares?: her perception that everything in it “has a double impact, with one effect or style imposed on the other—Now on Then, ballet dancing on [Gershwin’s] show tunes”; her examples of “the multiple images, the visual punning” that inclule the d’Amboise solo to “Liza,” which suggests “soft-shoe, virtuoso tap, and classical lift and amplitude all at once”; her noting “the tight choreography [that] sustains an almost unbelievable musical interest,” and Balanchine’s “evident delight in choreographing the countermelodies, cross-rhythms, and abrupt syncopations out of which Gershwin built his compositions.” These perceptions and others like them enable a reader not only to see “this wonderful ballet [that] enriches our fantasy life immeasurably, as works of art are meant to do,” but to reject Clive Barnes’s doubt, in the Times, that the Gershwin music “is worth a ballet in our national repertory,” and his certainty that Balanchine, whose work in the Rodgers and Hart musicals of the 30’s Barnes never saw, was “not a masterly creator in this field” and “this is not his medium.”

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Here I must mention what I find curious and puzzling: that Croce, who can write criticism as excellent as what I have quoted, appears not to understand the nature of the critic’s operation and its relation to the reader. An example of this is her comment on another critic’s statement—that it works for someone who sees what that critic sees, but not for someone who doesn’t see it, which means for her that his statement is invalid as criticism, when the fact is precisely that the critic reports not the truth about a work of art, but the truth for him, which becomes true for those others who find it confirmed by their experience of the work.

Thus Croce’s writing about Balanchine’s Who Cares? is true for me because it is confirmed by what I see; and similarly what I see in Jerome Robbins’s Watermill confirms her annihilating comments on its details and her summary characterization of them as “tedious hokum”; as what I see in his other recent works confirms her statement that “he is fatally attracted to pretentious undertakings” and that “no matter what style the piece is in, the same emptiness yawns from within.”

There are numerous other instances of such confirmation; but there are also instances of the opposite. My experience of Balanchine’s Don Quixote continues to confirm her statement in 1968 that he “has filled an evening-long entertainment with an array of effects employing the full resources of the dance theater, each gripping the attention in a new way,” not her statements in 1975 that “it was an interesting failure . . . when it was new,” and that because Suzanne Farrell has outgrown her role in the first two acts the work is “stale and boring” until the dances in the third act, in which she “fully recaptures her old brilliance and adds to it a new gift for dramatization.” I recognize the damage Balanchine’s changes have inflicted on the first act; but I find that what was astounding and overwhelming in 1968—e.g., Farrell’s solo with shepherdess’s staff in Act 1, the courtiers’ Sarabande and the Pas de Deux Mauresque in Act 2—is astounding and overwhelming today. I see in Balanchine’s Bugaku a fascinating work, not “the nearest thing in the New York City Ballet repertory to a Béjart ballet” that Croce sees. I not only find in Jewels the Balanchine masterpiece she says it is not, but am amazed by her disposal of Emeralds with the statement that it is “novel in the context of the repertory he has fashioned over the years,” not considering even the extraordinarily novel and gripping walking pas de deux for Francisco Moncion and Mimi Paul worthy of specific comment—to say nothing of the work’s other unmentioned marvels.

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So with the writing about dancers. I have seen the Makarova Croce describes who “has a legato rhythm by nature, and . . . loves languishing tempos” (though “languishing tempos” is less than adequate for the extremes of her slow-motion Odette in the Royal Ballet Swan Lake two years ago). I have also seen the Baryshnikov who in traditional roles gives “a new urgency to commonplace allegro steps like brisés (in the two speeding diagonals [in Act 2] of Giselle,” and invents new steps, such as the “turning jeté [jump] in which, at the last second, he changes the foot he’s going to land on, and his legs flash past each other in the air.” And in the performances of Farrell when she returned to the New York City Ballet in 1975 I saw what Croce reported seeing—the “clarity and composure [of] the shoulders, neck, and head,” the “refinement of the arms and the simple dignity of the hands,” the “grace of deportment and sensitivity of phrasing.” But I saw them as an even more overwhelmingly beautiful amplification of what I had seen in the years before her departure from the company in 1969, not as the striking change from the distortion of “every one of the roles she danced [by] the absurd sky-high penchées, the flailing spine and thrust hips, the hiked elbows and flapping hands” that Croce said she had seen in the performances before 1969. And while I undoubtedly could have missed the small flaws that the eye of a Denby or a Croce would have perceived, I find it impossible to believe that I—and the others I have spoken to—missed the flamboyant distortion Croce described.

She also speaks of the 1963-69 years as the Farrell Years in which Balanchine projected what he saw in her onto the company’s other dancers (“today we can see her even in little Gelsey Kirkland”), so that her image became the company norm, the “swinging pelvises, baling-hook arms, and clawing hands” of that image became the company’s “new cruel orthodoxy,” and the dancers who took over Farrell’s roles after she left—Karin von Aroldingen, Sara Leland, Kay Mazzo—became “caricatures of the caricature she had become.” I didn’t see any of this; and to say Balanchine projected the image of Farrell’s tall body and the style of movement it dictated onto the different bodies of other dancers with their different styles of movement is to say he did what seems to me clearly impossible for him to have done if he had wanted to, and what I cannot believe he wanted to, given his known sensitivity to each dancer’s individual characteristics of body and movement, and his known practice, when a role is taken over by a new dancer, of modifying the role to fit the dancer, not of making the dancer fit into what the previous dancer did. What he did do after Farrell’s departure was to put into her roles in Don Quixote and Diamonds dancers who were unsuited to them; and what I saw was not caricatures of Farrell that resulted from Mazzo’s and Leland’s attempts to achieve her image, but the mere inadequacy and ineffectiveness of Mazzo and Leland in the movements—“the great sighing lifts” in Act 3 of Don Quixote—designed for the tall body neither of them has.

This is an example of the writing by Croce that doesn’t hold strictly to what her perceptive eye sees; and another example worth noting is what she writes about Patricia McBride. I see in McBride an accomplished, and at her best—in Rubies, Who Cares?, the final duets of Liebeslieder Walzer—an enjoyable and impressive dancer, but one without the exciting emanations of greatness radiated by Allegra Kent or Farrell, among others; which means I don’t see in her dancing any basis for Croce’s characterizing her as “the most exciting ballerina in America,” and the peer of Antoinette Sibley and Makarova in world ballet. But that isn’t all: I don’t see what in her performances has revealed to Croce that McBride is “the shyest, most tenderly true, bravest, and least corruptible of classical dancers,” or the fact—as if it is unique about McBride, not true of every dancer of her caliber—that “all she knows [about life] she seems to have learned through dancing and all she has to tell she tells through dancing.” I must conclude that something other than what Croce has seen McBride do on the stage is responsible for those statements (and must add that in my offstage encounters with McBride she has exhibited no shyness about berating someone whose regard for her dancing is not as high as her own).

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I am impelled to that conclusion again by Croce’s seeing as “quintessential Verdy” in Balanchine’s La Source only “firmly profiled arabesques and high relevés-passés that flattered Verdy’s pulled-up thighs and sensitive feet,” whereas others saw it in the idiosyncratic elegance of her flow of exquisitely inflected bodily configuration enlivened by her subtleties of rhythm. These others include a rising young male soloist of the New York City Ballet whom, recently, I heard observe thoughtfully, “I guess you’d have to say Violette was assoluta”; and Edward Villella, who years ago expressed a similar view, which Croce disputes. Asked what his dancer’s eye could perceive in Violette Verdy’s dancing in addition to what a non-dancer saw, Villella described a few of the “small, delicate things” his eye had in fact perceived: the way she phrased her rising on points and coming down from them; the way—in the repeated passé, passé, hold of her solo in Tchaikowsky Pas de Deux—“not only the foot and the leg and the body and the arms, but the eyes too [reach] the same point in time perfectly”; the way—at another point in this piece—she stopped after a few turns, but didn’t really stop: “as the music continues . . . her arms and fingertips are still going with it, then the air just beyond her fingertips.” To Croce the aspects of Verdy’s style that Villella described—and she cites specifically only the last one, quoting only the words “stops, but doesn’t really stop,” and in this way omitting Villella’s point—were those “one might as easily find irritatingly mannered as beautiful and impressive.” Villella also told how certain lunges in the Symphony Op. 21 of Balanchine’s Episodes “didn’t make choreographic sense” to him until he saw Verdy do them, and “when she lunged and turned I saw a motivation for the lunge and turn—both in visual terms and in relation to the music”; concerning which Croce says that the motivation Villella saw was Verdy’s “[acting] the movements with her face and body, as if to imply an emotional context,” and that this was “in conflict with the intention of Balanchine’s choreography”—which, if true, Villella would have perceived and Balanchine would have corrected. And Villella, finally, spoke of what produced those extraordinary performances: Verdy’s physical gifts as a dancer, the fact that she was “a thinking dancer” who worked with her mind as well as her body, her “fantastic discipline . . . fantastic dedication to the essentials that have to be worked at day in and day out”; concerning which Croce’s comment is a disdainful “interesting if you are interested in Verdy.”

It turns out that with the critic’s essential gift of a perceptive eye Croce doesn’t have the additional important gift of personal and intellectual discipline.