Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker: An Arlene Croce Reader

by Arlene Croce

Overview

The best of America's best writer on dance

"Theoretically, I am ready to go to anything-once. If it moves, I'm interested; if it moves to music, I'm in love."

From 1973 until 1996 Arlene Croce was The New Yorker's dance critic, a post created for her. Her entertaining, forthright, passionate reviews and essays have revealed the logic and history of ballet, modern dance, and their postmodern variants to a generation of theatergoers. This volume contains her most significant and provocative pieces-over a fourth have never appeared in book form-writings that reverberate with consequence and controversy for the state of the art today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429930130
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/30/2003
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	720
File size:	798 KB

About the Author

Arlene Croce was dance critic at The New Yorker for years. She is the author of several previous books, including Afterimages, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, Going to the Dance, and Sight Lines. She lives in New York City.

Arlene Croce is the author of The Fred Astaire&Ginger Rogers Book, Afterimages, Going to the Dance, and Sight Lines.

Read an Excerpt

Writing in the Dark, Dancing in the New Yorker

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By Arlene Croce

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2000 Arlene Croce
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3013-0

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CHAPTER 1

THE SEVENTIES

Joffrey Jazz

As its name indicates, Deuce Coupe is a vehicle for two companies, and as a joint presentation of Twyla Tharp's company and the City Center Joffrey Ballet it was the hit of the entire spring season. Now it's back in repertory with much the same cast as before and in even better performance condition. The audience loves it; I love it. But Deuce Coupe is more than a big hit, more than the best thing the Joffrey Ballet has ever done — it's the outstanding accomplishment to date of the ballet year.

For excitement and originality, none of the new works by major choreographers compares with it — not even Merce Cunningham's Changing Steps, which was given last March at the Brooklyn Academy. I say "not even Cunningham" because there may well be a genealogical link between him and Twyla Tharp. I won't attempt to trace Twyla Tharp's line of descent — she seems to have absorbed something from nearly everybody who moves well — but, like Cunningham, she is routinely classified as "avant-garde," and only a few years ago she was one of those choreographers who were working without music and in nontheatrical and open spaces — either out-of-doors or in museums and gyms. The only element that she did not eliminate was dancing itself, and in this she was unique — defying the exponents of nondance and antidance. The way she danced was unique, too. The open-space movement in choreography goes on, and Twyla Tharp now has her imitators, but at that time nothing like her had ever been seen before. The finest of the post-Cunningham generation of choreographers, up until Deuce Coupe she was thought to be also the most forbiddingly idiosyncratic. Even when, with her own small company, she started choreographing in more conventional surroundings to eighteenth-century music and to jazz, the burn of her intensely personal style didn't wear off, and her dancers seemed to be moved by a form of private communication which made them unlike any other dancers that one could see. I believe that the dances she has done for them — especially the great jazz ballets Eight Jelly Rolls and The Bix Pieces and The Raggedy Dances — are her best work. But Deuce Coupe is a good work, too. It isn't a great ballet, but it fills to abundance every need it was meant to fill, and, as far as ballet audiences are concerned, nothing like it has ever been seen before, either.

Deuce Coupe is a pop ballet and a great gift to the Joffrey company. Since 1968, when Robert Joffrey put his company on the cover of Time with a mixed-media/rock ballet called Astarte, it has been polishing its reputation as America's great swinging company. This is one half of the Joffrey company's Janus profile; the other is the image of custodian of modern-day classics from the international repertory. But the Joffrey's dual policy stretched the capacities of its dancers too far. Dancers live and progress on roles that are created for them. All those slick, empty, and violent ballets by Gerald Arpino that slammed the audience with the Dionysian ecstasy of dance or appealed to the audience's political convictions and hunger for "relevance" certainly did contribute to the shaping of a style, but it was a style that rendered Joffrey dancers unfit for anything better. As classical dancers, the Joffreys have no touch; they look squat, badly placed, hectic, and unmusical. When Joffrey, who has excellent taste in non-Joffrey ballets, imports a classic Danish ballet like Konservatoriet, his dancers can hardly get through it. After seven years in residence at the City Center, the structure by which the company made its dancers grow was dead. Generally speaking, you can't feed dancers on imports and revivals. Imports and revivals please audiences; they seldom help the dancer, who can't be at his best in somebody else's repertory.

It would be too much to claim that Deuce Coupe has saved the Joffrey, but it does give the dancers something genuine to respond to — something that's exactly suited to their talents — and it tidies up the company's self-image. It's just as if Twyla Tharp had said, "So you want pop? I'll give you pop," but what she has given the Joffrey is so close to the real thing that part of the audience — the part that has decided what contemporary, orgiastic, youth-spirited, with-it ballet looks like — is taken by surprise. Deuce Coupe astounds by the utter unfamiliarity of familiar things. Its music is a tape collage of fourteen Beach Boys hits, starting with "Little Deuce Coupe" and ending with "Cuddle Up" — probably the last jukebox pop that was pop, and not Pop Art. Its decor is spray-can graffiti applied to a rolling backcloth while the ballet is in progress. And its dancing — that which gives it life and joy — is a peculiar Tharpian combination of classical ballet and the juvenile social dancing of the past decade. The ballet steps are like a primitive's-eye view of classical style, fascinating in their plainness and angularity, and the social dances are rich with crazy, campily corny suggestion. Neither type of dancing is what it would be in the hands of any other choreographer, and yet neither is what it ordinarily appears to be in its raw state — in the classroom, or in school gyms, ballrooms, and discothèques. Whatever the Tharp eye sees, it changes. (Even the graffiti, with their characteristic stilted lines, curly serifs, and locked edges, look as if they were intended for Deuce Coupe. And, oh, New York! Isn't it nice to see the stuff in a place where it belongs?) As a result, the whole ballet has this low-contrast choreographic weave that knits its separate scenes together, but there's so much action going on, and the action is so complicated and delicately timed, that the effect is never one of monotony. (There is one moment when the ballet seems to slump. At the end of "Don't Go Near the Water," we get one more roiling group instead of something we haven't seen before.) This complexity and delicacy can be undervalued. Most of the time inDeuce Coupe, the dancers appear to be behaving with such realism that we could believe they were making it up as they went along. People who don't often go to the ballet might recognize the validity of these dances at once and wonder why such a fuss was being made over them. People who go more regularly fall into the trap of their expectations, and Deuce Coupe looks formless to them — just taken off the street and thrown onto the stage. Actually, no one has put contemporary American popular dancing of quite this intensity and freedom on the stage before, and I am sure no one but Twyla Tharp would have known how to make these dances legible in the theatre. A hundred kids going berserk at a school prom is a powerful but not necessarily a theatrical spectacle. To be realized on the stage, such potency has to be objectified; the material has to be changed and heightened. In the process, it becomes beautiful, but "beauty" isn't the choreographer's object — clarity is. And Twyla Tharp does something that people dancing for recreation don't do: she makes a theatrical translation of the music. In "How She Boogalooed It," she doesn't give us the Boogaloo — she gives us something that looks more like snake dancing at top speed. "Alley Oop," "Take a Load Off Your Feet," "Long Tall Texan," and "Catch a Wave" are based as much on the lyrics as on the music, and include several obvious, Broadway-style jokes. In "Papa Ooh Mau Mau," the dancers mime smoking pot and freaking out. When the music isn't interesting enough, it's speeded up or two tracks are run side by side. We do get a long way from the school prom. The spontaneity and naturalness of the dances are a marvelous illusion, a secret of professional style. Everyone has had the experience in the theatre of the happy occurrence — some fantastically accurate inflection or bit of punctuation, so like a moment in life we think it couldn't happen again. Twyla Tharp's choreography is full of such moments that do happen again. In Deuce Coupe, I think of Nina Wiener's freak-out or Glenn White landing in fifth position right on the pow! of the downbeat in "Wouldn't It Be Nice." (The surprise is partly that you hadn't seen him jump.)

Deuce Coupe makes rather a special point of ballet versus pop dancing. In this, it's an extension of The Bix Pieces, which was composed two years ago for the Tharp company's formal Paris début.The Bix Pieces, named for Bix Beiderbecke, is based on jazz-band dance music of the 1920s. The dancing is a moody synthesis of the tap-toe-baton-acrobatic routines that millions of American children have been heirs to, and in the course of the work a narrator informs us, "The fundamental concepts of dance are few, but the stylistic appraisal of these concepts can produce infinite combinations and appearances. For example, 'slap, ball, change' is 'chassé' in ballet, or 'slap' ('tendu'), 'ball' ('piqué'), 'change' ('plié')." This is demonstrated, and the narrator goes on to say, "So, you see, all things can be profoundly and invisibly related, exactly and not at all the same." Deuce Coupe deals in a similar technical paradox — sometimes at too great a length. For example, it has a ballerina (Erika Goodman) performing a classical solo virtually all through the piece. Sometimes she's alone onstage and sometimes she's the eye of the hurricane, but she never stops dancing, and since there are other ballet dancers on the stage, I have sometimes wondered why she's there. She is eternal, the others are temporal? But I have never wished Miss Goodman off the stage while watching her on it. I like what she does, and she's doing it this season with unusual beauty. Erika Goodman is chubby and neckless, with big legs that wave in disproportionately high extensions. With her large-scale gesture and demonstrative warmth, she's becoming a baby Struchkova. But, like most of the Joffrey girls, she lacks something as a classical stylist, and her role — a taxing one, which consists of the ballet vocabulary performed alphabetically — is so Tharpian in conception that it really doesn't resemble classical ballet enchainements at all. What we see in her random provocative movements is a parallel to the dislocated, familiar-unfamiliar movements that dominate the main action of the ballet. The two dance forms — ballet and popular — remain technically distinguishable but become stylistically fused. It's a Tharpian fusion, and the didactic point of The Bix Pieces disappears. All things are no longer so invisibly related.

There's a sense in which Deuce Coupe would be better if the Joffrey members of the cast were better classical dancers. Twyla Tharp has asked a lyricism of them, and a precision of épaulement, that they can't consistently supply. Yet in "Wouldn't It Be Nice," the most exhilarating of the Beach Boys songs, the steps are entirely classical, and this is the number I love best. From the opening port de bras to the quietly held preparations in fifth — held so long that when the jetés into attitude front start popping like molecules around the stage the pressure appears to blow them into the air — there is a tender mystery to the dancing which seems equal to the best of The Bix Pieces and to the best classical ballet I know. Deuce Coupe makes the Joffrey dancers look human (at the first performance I had trouble recognizing most of them); it rescues them from the curse of pseudo-ballet and gives them back their natural grace of movement. They look very much as they might have looked as children — which is right for the preteen, presexual world that the ballet invokes — and they are magically divested of their customary hard-sell performing style. Besides Goodman and White, the Joffrey dancers who shine most vividly in this new light are (in order of their appearance): Rebecca Wright, William Whitener, Beatriz Rodriguez, Larry Grenier, Gary Chryst, Donna Cowen, and Eileen Brady.

As for the Tharp dancers, their stage personalities are so alive that we can follow them like characters in the Sunday comics. Twyla Tharp herself, with her sorrowful-baleful semi-hallucinated stare, is the Krazy Kat of the bunch. Sara Rudner is the Mysterious Lady (her Deuce Coupe solo "Got to Know the Woman" is ironically seductive, like an adolescent's vision of sexuality), and Rose Marie Wright, the "Long Tall Texan," has an instantaneous impact on the audience — it applauds her on sight. Kenneth Rinker, the lone male, is a brotherly, somewhat taciturn corduroy-cap type, and the two other girls, Isabel Garcia-Lorca and Nina Wiener, have a fashion-model elegance. The group dancing of the Tharp company suggests a federation of individuals, and you can see the same kind of freedom in the group dancing of Deuce Coupe. But the restlessness and pain of American children are in it, too. The end of the ballet — the long, slow crescendo of tossing arms, lunges in plié, and backward bourrées on pointe, with here and there a fall to the floor — is half truth, half myth. It sums up a kind of schmaltzy romanticism that young people love to wrap themselves in, and it is absolutely true to our experience of their world. The crescendo is ingeniously stage-managed, gaining might not by mass but by intensity, like a hum that gets louder, and it ends in a masterstroke — a freeze-pose blackout into silhouette. The cliché is the only possible schmaltz-climax. Then, gradually, it loosens, Miss Goodman takes a few hops forward, and Deuce Coupe continues somewhere in space as the curtain falls.

Deuce Coupe is fresh and exciting because it is closer to its source in popular culture than most pop or "jazz" ballets ever care to be. The music is the kind of music for which a dance idiom already exists. The choreography is in part a parody of that idiom, but it is authentic. In two other ballets in the Joffrey repertory, Eliot Feld's Jive and Arpino's Trinity, the music is concert-hall jazz and evangelical rock, respectively: two forms for which the dancing has to be invented, and in both ballets the choreography is more synthetic than the music. Jiveis set to Morton Gould's "Derivations for Clarinet and Jazz Band" — the same score that Balanchine used for a piece called Clarinade,which is remembered solely because it was the first ballet he created at Lincoln Center. The music doesn't work any better for Feld, who transforms it into a tight, cheerless, and ambivalent pastiche of the fifties, the period of Jerome Robbins wearing sneakers. It ends with the dancers lurching at the audience and crying "Jive!" Jive (a forties title) represents a good choreographer working below his form. Trinity represents a bad choreographer working at the very top of his. The work is all big jumps and running lifts, and it is consumed with the fake piety of the beads-and-amulets era. At the end, the dancers place peace candles all over the stage. In the context of these two ballets, and of the Joffrey repertory generally, Deuce Coupe is a masterpiece. Not only is it musically sound and poetically convincing — its emotions are the kind that make civilized contact in the theatre possible. It doesn't bludgeon us for a response; when it throws out a manipulative net, it does so with a grin. It doesn't pretend that we share the life it depicts, or make us feel that we should. It is completely objective, but, beyond that (Jive is objective, too, and dead), it respects its material. Deuce Coupe is an adult ballet about kids.

— October 29, 1973

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Writing in the Dark, Dancing in the New Yorker by Arlene Croce. Copyright © 2000 Arlene Croce. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Writing in the Dark,
THE SEVENTIES,
Joffrey Jazz,
Ailey and Revelations,
Cunningham at Westbeth,
The Blue Glass Goblet, and After,
Royal Jitters,
Glimpses of Genius,
Makarova's Miracle,
The Two Trockaderos,
Taylor and Nureyev on Broadway,
Blind Fate,
Over the Rainbow,
New Boy in Town,
Back to the Forties,
Farrell and Farrellism,
Free and More Than Equal,
Going in Circles,
American Space,
It's a Wise Child,
Congregations, Criticism, and a Classic,
Separate Worlds,
An American Giselle,
The End of the Line,
Momentous,
More or Less Terrific,
Two by Balanchine,
Home to Bournonville,
Isadora Alive,
Baryshnikov's Nutcracker,
Notes on a Natural Man,
A Hundred Ways to Make a Dance,
White Turning Gray,
The Godmother,
Prose into Poetry,
Adagio and Allegro,
Broadway Downbeat,
Arts and Sciences and David Gordon,
On Video, On Tap,
The Spoken Word,
Balanchine's Petipa,
Repertory Dead and Alive,
Nureyev as Nijinsky, Babilée as Babilée,
Ballet Alert,
Blue and White,
Kylián and His Antecedents,
Theory and Practice in the Russian Ballet,
Trooping the Colors at Covent Garden,
THE EIGHTIES,
Swing Street Revisited,
Doin' the Old Low Down,
Le Sacre without Ceremony,
Slowly Then the History of Them Comes Out,
Heart of Darkness,
Sub-Balanchine,
Mythology,
Harlem's Fokine,
Think Punk,
A New Old Giselle,
Son of Pilobolus,
Tchaikovsky,
The Royal at Fifty,
Connections: Taylor and Tharp,
The Return of the Shades,
The Kirov Abroad, Stravinsky at Home,
Anna Pavlova,
Ordinary People,
Theatre as Truth,
The Legacy,
Reflections on Glass,
In Your Face: Home Thoughts from Abroad,
A Balanchine Triptych,
Mark Morris Comes to Town,
Tharp's Sinatra,
Visualizations,
Three Elders,
The Search for Cinderella,
Life Studies,
Bad Smells,
"Giselle, ou La Fille des Bayous",
Strangers in the Night,
Championship Form,
An American in Paris,
Double Vision,
The Fire This Time,
Tango,
Hard Facts,
The Dreamer of the Dream,
Spanish from Spain,
Post-Modern Ballets,
A Dance to Spring,
Risky Business,
Zeitgeist,
The Bolshoi Bows In,
The Last Waltz,
Dimming the Lights,
Crises,
Sun and Shade,
Family Secrets,
THE NINETIES,
Classical Values,
Multicultural Theatre,
Waking Up The Sleeping Beauty,
Agnes and Martha,
Miami's Jewels,
The Balanchine Show,
Behind White Oaks,
Discussing the Undiscussable,
Our Dancers in the Nineties,
On Beauty Bare,
Also by Arlene Croce,
Index,
Notes,
Copyright Page,