Books: Turning Words into Motion

GOING TO THE DANCE by Arlene Croce, Knopf; 427pages; $20

In her introduction to this new collection of dance commentary, Arlene Croce writes that she has developed a repertory as a critic "concentrating on certain recurrent themes, much as dancers do when given the same roles season after season." Going to the Dance shows that formidable critical repertory. Croce has natural authority and a succinct, pungent style. She stands for musicality and clarity in choreography, artistry and daring onstage. The pleasure in reading these pieces, which were first printed in The New Yorker, is in the variety of performers she finds who embody her standards. They may be hoofers or acrobats or even movie actors. About the very best— George Balanchine, Suzanne Farrell, Mikhail Baryshnikov— she can write truly rhapsodic prose, an act of daring in itself. About the pretentious, the emptily theatrical or the slipshod, she can be funny or downright outraged.

Croce's condemnations are rigorous and vivid. Of the late modernist Doris Humphrey she writes: "Humphrey was a structuralist who could reduce a Bach concerto to a nest of mixing bowls; the bowls were brown." Of the immensely popular work of the Netherlands Dance Theater's Jiŕi Kylian: "A favorite form of pas de trois is the woman pulled and dragged on a steeplechase course between two men. It stands for rape, for exaltation, for fun."

There are other figures with whom she shows a sort of didactic impatience. Her pan of Twyla Tharp's Broadway effort, When We Were Very Young, is clearly done regretfully, but the conclusion is inevitable: the show, she says, "isn't a musical, it isn't a dansical. Like so many shows that are being produced today, it's a booksical."

Jerome Robbins is another choreographer about whom she has mixed feelings. In general the JL format of Going to the Dance—relatively brief, tightly focused pieces on specific works or companies— is adequate, but Robbins trails through the book like a wraith. One gets only pieces of a critique: that his masterpieces are Afternoon of a Faun and Dances at a Gathering, that he is often too clever by half, that he is good at finding the moves that enhance young dancers. One finishes the book feeling the need of a real assessment of Robbins partly because he draws such strong, quirky reactions from her.