Writing in the Dark: Dancing in The New Yorker.

Writing in the Dark: Dancing in The New Yorker by Arlene Croce. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2000. 768 pages. $40. ISBN: 0-374-10455-7.

I have never seen so much passion compressed into so little space as in this collection of dance reviews by Arlene Croce. True, the book has a generous number of pages, but the format is small; there are no illustrations except a blurry one of As Time Goes By on the dust jacket. The reviews were assembled by editor Robert Cornfield, who also selected the format.

It may seem odd to write of a book's format before discussing the content. But Croce's dance writing has a strange power. It's a power that extends beyond the printed page, that infuriates and at the same time captivates. Perhaps that is why it is jacketed in quiet blue and bound that way, too.

The articles, with the exception of the final one, were chosen from those written between 1973 and 1996 in The New Yorker. In other words, they were written from "critics' heaven." Or as Croce put it in her introduction to the text, "I never wrote on assignment, was never asked to cover this or that event ... my choices of subject and deadline were never even queried. ... When, as frequently happened, I overran the space, more space was found."

This extreme editorial freedom, plus the fact that Croce has an unusually probing mind, makes for essays that are rich in detail and contain allusions that extend beyond the specific event and flesh it out with context. There's also a danger to this largesse. At times the essays appear to have been written with a burin. It cuts deeply and sharply beneath the surface; and because the writer has space and time on her side, the cutting sinks ever deeper and sharper.

This happens especially when she describes individual dancers who don't please her. A 1998 review of Heather Watts typifies this tone: "What she began doing with her Balanchine roles was leaving out steps, simplifying what she couldn't put over.... Soon she was a mannered, facile 'star,' no longer just a limited dancer in beyond her depth." Of Watts in Rubies, Croce comments, "Now she brings to it an insolence, a cheesiness worthy of the Paris Opera or Bejart."

And of Bejart himself she writes, "The same chunks of leaden diablerie churn senselessly through one ballet after another, usually with some young man at the center pressing his fists to his temples.... Bejart shapes his ballets with a channel selector...."

Croce could descend like Carabosse on hapless dancers, choreographers and companies. Of the much revered Doris Humphrey she comments (in her analysis of the style of choreographer Jiri Kylian), "The choreographer whom Kylian most resembles, though, is Doris Humphrey. Humphrey was a structuralist who could reduce a Bach concerto to a nest of mixing bowls."

And of choreographer Choo San Goh, then at the height of his career with the Washington Ballet, "We've reached a new point in the history of modern, abstract ballet--a point of near computerization where coded options make choreography. Next to Goh's smooth calibrations, ordinary bad choreography looks Paleolithic. Bad choreography usually has some personality. Goh's has none."

One could go on and on extracting these nuggets of pique. But what is more truly characteristic of Croce is the skill she uses in substantiating an extended harangue. Her three most notable are "Dimming the Lights" (1988), "The Balanchine Show" (1993) and "Discussing the Undiscussable" (1994-5). All three are born of a conviction so deep that it borders on despair.

In the first two she lashes out at Peter Martins, ballet master in chief of the New York City Ballet, for what she sees as the company's serious artistic decline. As she sums it up, "For the first time since Balanchine's death, the company didn't appear to know how it got where it is, or where it was going."

Patiently, even doggedly, she sustains her arguments until, whether you agree with her or not, you want to shout, "Enough!" and get on to another topic, or you try to picture Martins eternally confined to Croce's pillory.

"Discussing the Undiscussable" preceded a Brooklyn Academy performance of Bill T. Jones's Still/Here. Accompanying her powerful polemic against "victim art" was the assertion that she did not plan to see the work. I found Croce's argument far more thought provoking than the actual dance, but her cryptic remark in the book's introduction seemed oddly destructive. It said, "One of the things that bothered me was choreographers so loaded with anti-depressants that you couldn't look at their work and distinguish their creative personalities from their medications."

One might also have this feeling about Croce as her pique switched to ecstasy in the presence of George Balanchine and his beloved protegee, Suzanne Farrell. Contemplating them, Croce left Carabosse behind and became the Lilac Fairy.

Of Farrell, "Among her earliest contributions to technique were her enlargement of the scale on which big movements are done and her telescoping of the speed of change from big to small movements. In the extremes of its range, her technique was hair-raising; it seems safe to say we shall never see anything like it again."

As for Balanchine, sheer quantity tells the story. The index of Writing in the Dark bears seventy-one Balanchine listings. The distant runners-up are Marius Petipa with thirty-six and Jerome Robbins with twenty-eight. But her adoration (I use the word advisedly) of Balanchine is not only concerned with his genius and his incalculable effect on twentieth-century ballet, it also has to do with Croce's conviction that those who are following him "can add nothing to what he has said."

But great art does not only have to do with accrual. There are also new paths, even if it does take time to hack them out.