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Four American women, Marcia Siegel, Deborah Jowitt, Arlene Croce and Nancy Goldner, are writers who became dance critics partly by accident and partly by design and who came of age as dance critics during the ‘heyday of formalism’ in New York.(1) The ‘heyday’, from 1965 to 1985, gathered momentum as a ‘golden age’ of choreography (as Croce coined it). In responding to the age, these critics were informed by a mission to publish ‘serious’ writing about dance and to consciously generate and promote a distinct development in the discipline of dance criticism through the profile of their work and teachings. Although they have rarely shared dialogue, exchanged views in public forums, or aligned themselves in any formal way (2), I nevertheless proceed cautiously but confidently with the notion that this pas de quatre of women writers form the core of a New York School of dance criticism.

Arlene Croce pointed out in an essay on Edwin Denby in Sight Lines that ‘nothing is harder to spot than the unconscious patterns that connect the world of contemporaries’. Perhaps these individualistic critics of such distinction feel a little uncomfortable with the idea of being labelled as a school. Martin Esslin gives me a little boost of courage here, though. When discussing a similar objective in theatre criticism in his work, Anatomy of Drama, he argues:

a descriptive term applied post factum may be useful even if the people to whom it is applied are unaware of its existence and meaning, provided that such a term is not taken as totally defining the works to which it is applied, but merely as descriptive of certain features which they have in common and which are basic to them.

I cannot help but be fascinated with the parallel that exists between this group of contemporary American women writers who were the pioneers of a new dance criticism and the women choreographers who pioneered the American modern dance: Duncan, Humphrey, St Denis, Graham. Both groups created new languages and approaches for grappling with their disciplines - pushing the subject of dance into new and enduring dimensions. In describing these critics as pioneers, I am reminded of Croce’s comments:

We are past the era - largely male dominated – of happenings and into a phase of planned activity whose most prominent organisers are women like Rainer, Twyla Tharp, and Deborah Hay. Rainer’s compulsive logic is a trait common to all three, as it is a trait of most women artists. (I threw out my copy of The Second Sex long ago or I’d make you a list, saying how the Brontës, Steins, and Woolfs outnumber the Austens, Cathers and George Eliots in any competition between innovative and traditional. And in American dance, the roll call, from Loïe Fuller to Isadora and onward, is virtually all-women and all-pioneer).(3)

These writers, more than any other contemporary dance critic published, expanded our notions and vocabulary of dance with such persistence that they demanded we pay attention to choreographic text with the same willingness and imagination we might to other forms of literature. There was among these critics a striking familiarity with the American dance scene - a kind of in house quality which, rather than being exclusive in tune, infected the reader with its enthusiasm and intimate knowledge of the ‘family tree’ of American dance. These critics had an abundancy of dance to view, a willingness to look for the new, and an alertness in recognising new aspects of a tradition or heritage. They renewed their response to dance again and again, infusing their ‘critical repertory’, as Croce coined it, in the same way that a dancer must find out something for the first time every time s/he performs. In the spirit of ‘historian’ I am impressed by the shape and texture of an era brought to life by their writings and by the historical significance of the writing itself, in introducing and refining a revolution in dance in print. Siegel states in The Shapes of Change ‘When he (Balanchine) repeats an arabesque or a battement twelve different ways he’s not exposing his own lack of ideas but the arabesque’s plenitude of them.’ This comment reflects the spirit of the New York School.

In identifying a school I am responding to the values and characteristics common to a group of critics who share a particular dance environment and who influence our perception of dance in a particular way. ‘Walk into a museum gallery for the first time,’ says George Jackson, and before you can look at any of the art properly, chances are that you’ll become aware of style. By style I mean the things that advertise authorship as well as a point of view, a hierarchy of values, the set of assumptions that define the universe of a work, or a corpus, or an entire school.”(4)

All four women discussed here formed their critical careers and reputations in New York, largely through their writings in The New Yorker (Croce), The Nation and The Christian Science Monitor (Goldner), The Hudson Review and Soho Weekly News (Siegel) and The Village Voice (Jowitt). Many other publications have and do serve as outlets for their writings and readers here will be familiar with their published collections or other critical works.

Croce came to dance criticism via film criticism and a wide experience of writing for publications of the highest literary standards; Goldner arrived at the job having initially trained with the School of American Ballet, and after work as an editor with several publishing houses; Siegel was first a news reporter and then studied Movement Analysis at the Laban Institute, and Jowitt had a long standing career as a choreographer and performer in dance and theatre.

Via all these routes and investigative processes, this pas de quatre of critics possesses signature characteristics in their response to dance. To be expediently glib, one could say that Croce responds to ‘the power of the foot’, Siegel to body shape and movement qualities, Jowitt to the kinaesthetic sense of movement phrases, and Goldner to the mysteries of a dance’s effects.

Among them the dance work is perceived as being a whole history of performances and not just the single performance event. In Choreographing History, Susan Leigh Foster comments that traditional dance studies ‘have privileged the thrill of the vanished performance over the enduring impact of the choreographic intent’. While the prime mover status of description in the writings of the New York School was prompted by vanishing performance, the collective significance of this material is, when examined, located in choreography. Goldner goes so far as to say that ‘the choreography of the time has taught us to see in a particular way’(5). This idea of choreography as art object is clarified, elucidated and morally protected throughout their writings. Croce, the former of tastes and opinions and standards often seems to want to ‘save’ dance from its fans - those who enjoy dance as ‘undifferentiated sensation’. Siegel pleads with dancers not to ‘muck around with their posterity’. Jowitt would like audiences to get away from the idea of the immediate performance as the work, and care more about the dance as an enduring entity.(6) Goldner investigates the work for its permanent values - beyond cast changes and the erosions or alterations of time.

In their own ways these critics see their task in part as an ‘aesthetic conscience’ for the art of dance. As such, they actively distinguish through active language. To understand the aesthetic assumptions evident in the writings of these critics it is of course necessary to understand something about the kind of dance they viewed - what kind of dance environment they functioned in during those prolific years. For criticism, however much a creative act in itself, can only exist as part of the complete cycle of art: creation - viewing - response. That some criticism has the capacity to secure a work of art in one’s imagination and serve as a source of renewed intellectual and emotional animation speaks for both the creation and the creative response. All four critics have had a lot to say about the critical history of dance in America and about the changing aims in dance criticism. You need to read the introductions to their major collections or selected review/articles, such as Croce’s ‘Ballets without Choreography’ in Afterimages, to understand that during the twenty-year formative span there was more dance going en in New York than anywhere else. That Balanchine and Graham forged the major expressive philosophies and vocabularies of dance in America with important postmodern and neoclassical developments coming from Cunningham. Taylor, Tharp and others. That in the cycle encompassing Balanchine, the modern movement, the Judson Movement. dance on Broadway, the modern ballet hybrids and so on, dance as seen in New York probably ‘achieved all it set out to do in the 20th Century’.

The legacy of the New York School can best be understood through the characteristics that identify its critics. Descriptive writing - analytical, active and poetic - is the means by which they pinpointed the physical look of the dance, recalled the vivid kinaesthetic experience of the dance, and conjured up its expressive effects (its enduring imaginative value). By describing what they saw, they revealed how they saw. Description became a wav of telling the story of the dance - from its formal structures to its expressive effects. Jowitt’s description of Martha Graham’s Primitive Mysteries is an example of such ‘story telling:

When the figure in white runs in tiny steps from one cluster of women to another, each group responds to her gesture with one of its own, and these terse gestures bloom, out of stillness as icons suggesting crowning, praying, rocking a cradle. spreading a ritual meal... the piano strikes single chords, while the oboe sustains a high wail. On an abrupt chord, the woman stretches out her arms, and the others begin to circle her in huge, racking leaps, their bodies bent forward. Even when the leaps accelerate and scale down into runs the effect is terrifying.(6)

Such writing met dance on its own terms and found the motivation for language within the movement. Croce too, whose dance criticism was more inclined towards complex enchaînements of references and issues, adopted a ‘story telling’ mode in her descriptive writing. Capturing the sassy colloquial, irreverent style of Tharp in a 1971 performance of Eight Jelly Rolls, she observed:

Rudner falls down dead once, twice... It’s Twyla’s turn and she’s loaded: sick, filthy, drunk. She’s flat on her nose and can ‘t get up. She’s up and off balance, legs spiralling, knees sinking, keeling and careening the length of the stage.(7)

These descriptions bring the image into action, select essential characteristics, and tell us how they perform as the matrix of the dance. In one of her ‘Cunningham Diaries’ in The Bennington Review, Goldner described Cunningham’s movement traits with phrases like ‘tendus that don’t quite hit their destination’, ‘steps that unfold like a quick succession of flash cards’, and ‘elaborate in content and tonally austere’. Her writing, gorgeously economical while charged with action, reflected a dialogue with the dance informed by her fluency in the language of this choreographer. The ‘pen pushing bodies’ (to use Susan Leigh Foster’s term) of the actively seeing and writing critics discussed here are described in order to see more clearly; described as a methodology for clarifying that which endures. The frequent use of the phrase ‘the curtain rises’ in their reviews framed a picture for the reader of the movement on the choreographic canvas. In a review of Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto, included in Nancy Reynold’s collection, Repertory in Review, Nancy Goldner began:

Tin curtain rises and the music begins. Mazzo and group stand already in stage center, but do not move a muscle, while Stravinsky is off and running. You sit poised, then anxious: when will they begin to dance to music that begs for dancing?

What followed immediately was a vivid description of the movement in chronological order. Likewise, Jowitt’s review of Balanchine’s Vienna Waltzes, in her collection, The Dance in Mind, began: ‘The curtain goes up and we see a couple arm in arm, wandering through a glade’. And in Going To The Dance, Croce launched into a detailed descriptive account of Paul Taylor’s Runes with the opening, ‘The curtain rises on a dark stage, its horizon lit by a full moon’. This framing device assumed a ritualistic quality of preparation for the act of seeing and of gathering physical evidence for the dance’s expressive effects. The other most frequently used phrase, ‘the dance is about’ acted as a narrative, storytelling device. The critics were saying, in essence, ‘this is a story about a dance and it goes like this’. What we see, they told us, is a dance about a dance and to get to the expressive core - the heart of the story - you must believe what you see. ‘The dance is about’ framed the issue of style-as-meaning. Goldner wrote in The Nation of Tharp’s As Time Goes By that ‘it is about the elements intrinsic to dance composition’. Jowitt, writing about the same ballet in The New York Times, said, ‘If the dances look improvised at times, it’s because the movement - which is what Tharp’s dances are all about - looks so complex, so spontaneous, that you can hardly believe that someone taught it to someone else’. In At The Vanishing Point, Siegel wrote that Tharp’s Deuce Coupe is about ‘the flow and immediacy of crowds as much as it’s about individuals doing their thing in crowds’. The unyieldingly formalist nature of these statements brings to mind Cunningham’s response to the question of what one of his dances was ‘about’ with the quip ‘it’s about forty-five minutes long’.

The preparatory phrase ‘the curtain rises’ and the formally narrative phrase ‘the dance is about’ were most fruitfully operative for these critics when writing about the choreographers who most challenged and inspired them, the choreographers they often referred to as classicists. Classicists such as Taylor, Tharp, Cunningham, Balanchine and Ashton, reflected a purity of means in their dance-making that enabled the New York School critics to experience their works as meaningful within their steps and structures. Rarely in their writings does one encounter a specific definition of classicism even though this concept was such a potent linking characteristic between them. Collectively, classicism came to be defined in their work as being about objectivity, about dance being the subject-matter of dance, about revelations of meaning through structure, about the romance of choreographic restraint, about academic legibility and virtuosity, about the investigation of vocabulary to produce ‘something new from something old’ (as Nancy Goldner once put it in a discussion), and about the renewal of a heritage through innovation, rather than the erosion of a heritage through novelty.

In their attentiveness to the impact of innovation in the choreography of their admired classicists, these critics shared also a characteristic alertness to the new and set about contextualising its place in the cultural and historical agendas of current and past dance they viewed. Croce’s first encounter with the work of Twyla Tharp in 1969 is a near perfect example of a critic rising to the occasion of the new and finding a language to articulate the nature of the challenge. It is no surprise that Croce referred here to Balanchine and Cunningham as a means of historicising Tharp’s impact:

Twyla Tharp is the first of the new generation of avant-garde choreographers to develop a choreographic style ordered entirely by considerations of time and space... Watching a piece like Group Activities, one has the feeling of having emerged on the other side of some barrier to perception... you grasp immediately its difficulty and then its beauty of precision. The animation is so intense, the stop and go action of the piece so unpredictable, that one hangs on in quasi-dramatic suspense. The unforeseen logic of these calculations has a peculiar relation to the imagery of abstract ballet, they look brilliantly irrational to the eye. I know only two other choreographers who give the same effect, and they’re Mr B and Merce.(8)

The ballets of Twyla Tharp provide excellent examples of these critics’ alertness to the new because she was one of the major discoveries in their generation of dance viewing in much the same way as Balanchine was for Denby. Writing about Tharp’s Deuce Coupe, Siegel observed that it ‘demands that the audience overhaul its habitual way of looking at ballet’. And when Croce confronted Tharp’s As Time Goes By in 1973, she appraised the value of the work as ‘moving toward a new quality of plain speech in classical choreography’ and being ‘on the verge of creating a new style, a new humanity, for classical ballet dancers’.(9)

The prospect of structural constraint as a liberating, exhilarating, even romantic product of classicism was very often an integral part of the experience of the new on the part of these critics. While they sought a purity of means they were also ‘seduced’ by their responsiveness to innovation. Their school reflects, like the American culture, the political tensions bridging the puritanical and the decadent - ‘the American reformative conscience in action’ as Croce said of Graham’s early work - and the process of elaboration. One the one hand, the less-is-more aesthetic, instigated by Balanchine’s richly ‘lean’ choreography constantly led these critics to voice a reverence for the power and integrity of classicism while on the other hand, through layer upon layer of descriptive scrutiny, they elaborated on its innovative significance.

These critics were highly conscious of themselves as women writers and their critical point of view about dance often revealed a sympathy with the woman-as-creator, strong feelings about how women are portrayed in dance and how choreographers express man-woman relationships. In their view these relationships reveal the humanity of the choreographer and in addressing this issue there was often a highly-charged moral tone in their writing, operating as a kind of ‘guardianship of taste’ and establishing a criteria of morality. Ashton, Balanchine and Feld ballets, for instance, were often experienced by them as being ‘about’ love, by virtue of a timeless courtly relationship between choreographic restraint and codes of etiquette in the handling of men and women. In a critique on Cunningham dancing, by Nancy Goldner in The Bennington Review, and in a tone strikingly similar to Croce’s describing Balanchine, she said:

In many instances the delicate pillars of support he offers are more often than not decorative; it’s the idea of support, rather than the physical need of it, that seems paramount. That’s why, I think, Cunningham ‘s duets have such powerful strains of love in them... When Cunningham partners... he becomes the woman’s guardian angle, touching her not only to balance her but as though to commend her to our attention.

This romantic response to the technical and metaphorical working of the pas de deux is something that all four critics examined aesthetically, poetically and politically. In discussing the theatre of Martha Graham, for example, Croce distinguished between the treatment of women in the hands of a pioneering modern dance choreographer, and the classical ballet where men dominate as choreographers:

But the tragic heroine is also a triumphant heroine. Implicit in the rigor of her self-discipline is the certainty of her reward - self discovery. No Graham heroine dies unilluminated. The difference between her and the fated heroines of nineteenth century ballet - a Giselle or an Odette - is that the Graham heroine possesses, herself, the key to her mystery. She does not entrust it to the hero; she herself must unlock the inner door.”(10)

Siegel, in a robust piece on gender in dance approached the issue in this way:

In dance as well as life [it] hasn’t worked out yet... Today’s leading men seemingly don’t need any dimension or character nor do the women who oppress them. .. there isn’t simple warfare between men and women. The message goes beyond sexual partisanship... Their sex determines their role in society and their role in the dance. The man is always either a stud or a sensitive ambiguity. The woman is always a calculating bitch or a clinging vine.’(11)

There was a striking unity of expression regarding ‘anti female’ traits in choreography - that which ‘humiliates’ the dancers or sexually abuses women. Compare some of their writings on Béjart and MacMillan in this respect. On MacMillan’s Isadora, Manon, and Gloria, Croce had this to say:

There are so many floor-slamming, whizbang adagios, with so many acrobatic crotch held lifts, that they cancel each other out... The only other key MacMillan composes in-rapture - is the same as violence, but with heads thrown back is ecstasy... sex is the ruling metaphor; it’s what lends urgency and fluency to his dance language... In its continual self investigation, its kneading and twisting and joining of body shapes and body parts, it reaches a kind of creative delirium - a mystique of physique.(12)

And in a piece called ‘Knocking About the Jungle’ in The Dance in Mind, Jowitt described exactly what she saw with rather alarming results:

The Wild Boy is a joyride for sadists, disguised as a moral tale about corruption and the loss of innocence. Here’s how it goes: In a vine-draped jungle we see a slinky woman (Lise Houlton) preening... On come two violent, ragged men (Kevin McKenzie and Brian Adams). They share her. That is, one holds her foot and the other her armpits while they twist her around lasciviously... MacMïllan’s sense of theatre seems to have left him at the scent of this ballet. While he can express the men’s boisterous camaraderie through adroit close canon, the sex duet starts at fever pitch and stays there. I think that audiences can and should be shocked by violence sometimes; but I don’t like being stroked by it.

1f the violent sexual behaviour of men toward women is what the critics find distasteful in MacMillan, it is the anti-female attitude described through unisexuality and homosexuality in Béjart’s work that offends equally. ‘Béjart’s soft, sensuous movement and heavy-handed kitsch may be the new turn on,’ said Siegel in At The Vanishing Point, ‘but they mask a virulent anti-feminism and a re-routed sexuality that seem to be his real message.’(13)

In the moral tone that infiltrated such writing, ‘villains and heroes’ (as George Jackson coined it) were constructed and choreography itself was scrutinised within the context of this moral order. Quite apart from their resistance to choreography which literally ‘manhandled’ women in technically unsavoury ways, ‘hybrid’ choreography was also at issue. The hybrid species of choreography, in its attempt to ‘make more’ was, in the view of these critics, merely impoverished rather than innovative. Look at the difference in their tone when describing Tharp as a ground-breaking choreographer in contrast to their response to European neoexpressionist choreographers as sensationalist borrowers. The classicisms of Balanchine, Ashton, Taylor, Cunningham and Tharp were embraced for possessing the greater aesthetic value than the mannerisms, symbolisms and ritualisms of choreographers like Béjart, MacMillan, Van Dantzig, Van Manen and others. Their identification of American dance as distinct from European theatricalities was charged with nothing less than patriotic territorialism. Siegel, who of all the critics under discussion has been perhaps the most concerned to define American dance style and record its heritage, had this to say about the Royal Ballet’s performance in the Metropolitan Opera House in 1969:

If Ashton’s Jazz Calendar is jazz, we might as well call Paul Whiteman a soul brother. And if you are as steeped in the classical tradition as the Royal Ballet, I can see how you would think that Roland Petit’s titchy, ugly, going-nowhere movement for Pelleas and Melisande is modern. We in America know belter, to the everlasting credit of our own choreographers...’(14)

Morality, romance, codes of behaviour, restraint, purity and innovation were central concepts in the major choreographic influences they guarded, documented and claimed for an American dance identity.

As early as 1967, Croce was wary of a ‘misguided’ movement in dance which she and the other critics of the New York School saw largely as a misunderstanding and misapplication of the territory they claimed as American pure dance or what Croce called ‘dance totalism’:

The ideal is absolute expression, dancing for its own sake - what might be called dance totalism; and it has become a major international trend... never was there so ill-managed a renaissance, means have been imitated, but meaning has been confounded... In its struggle to avoid literalism, the younger generation of ballet choreographers has plunged into the opposite kind of doctrinal snare to totalism. Anything less than total dance metaphor seems proscribed. (5)

Goldner, too, had similar thoughts on the topic she described as the ‘Americanisation of European choreography’ which, in her opinion, was inaccurate and inappropriate. Writing in The Nation on May 8, 1972, she said: ‘When Americans decided to purify dance of literal meaning, they did not mean for it to be meaningless’. And another direct hit by Siegel the following year when discussing the Royal Ballet’s season at the Met to honour Ashton’s retirement went:

Van Dantzig is not a modern-dance choreographer since he only borrows Martha Grahamisms and glues them to the balletic body. But his attempt to amalgamate the two styles results in pomposity beyond all tolerating...(16)

The tone of these writings was militant in its ‘security control’ of what constitutes American-blooded dance innovation and dance purity. With both critical and political territorialism, pure dance was claimed as American, misconstrued pure dance alien (foreign) and alienating, resulting in not just the offensive dance totalism but worse, the cheap, titillating hybrid that blurred the boundaries between invention and trend, eclecticism and erosion. Their identification and preservation of American dance values was shadowed by notions of cultural morality, classicism by behavioural morality, and choreography by gender morality.

The current dance era is in a state of transition. Some suggest we are in a post-dance boom and that the values and contributions of the New York critics cited were particular only to their age - the golden age now at an end. But the notion of a post-dance boom era helps frame the New York School within a history that possesses a valuable legacy for the next generation. Currently, the various media and representations of performance artists, world dance, and physical theatre may be setting the philosophical and aesthetic agenda. And these forms invite, too, the challenge of rigorously imaginative and intellectually passionate discourse.

In an era that produced the choreographic distinction and genius of Balanchine, Graham, Cunningham, Taylor, Tharp and others, surely we can ask. ‘was this not enough?’ Perhaps the capacity of these critics for absorbing the new, for seeking a language with which to take on the new as history-in-the making, resulted in an appetite for the next generation’s innovations. The New York School seized upon a large territory of themes, issues and approaches in dance criticism and was pioneered them rigorously bringing the discipline to a new level of insight and intellectual and sensual stimulation. The critics’ subjectivity - passionate, romantic and sometimes excessive - infused the discipline of dance criticism with a new humanity. Their collective consciousness of dance history put dance criticism into a much more political arena. Their approaches to description offered criticism a technique for rendering the moment and grappling with the new. As women, they responded to notions of style, etiquette, morality and men-women relationships in choreography with a sense of romanticism and yet a rigorous pursuit of the formal. Their analytical insights shifted dance criticism into a more rigorous contextual arena.

This school of critics defined, and claimed for their own, the American classicists of choreography who challenged all of the above senses in them, and who demarcated a dear lineage in the American dance. Through the pioneering efforts of this school - teachers, critical historians, chroniclers, essayists, storytellers and prophets, the golden age of dance cross-fades with a golden age of dance criticism. And the relevance of dance in our culture becomes clearer as the writing reveals it.

 

Notes

1. Roger Copeland, ‘Dance Criticism and the Descriptive Bias’, Dance Theatre Journal, v. 10, No. 2, 1980, p 27.

2. Deborah Jowitt and Marcia Siegel share continuous dialogue about their work. Apart from their communication, all four critics emphasised in numerous discussions with me that they worked almost entirely in isolation of each other.

3. Arlene Croce, ‘The Avant-Garde on Broadway’, Afterimages, p340.

4. George Jackson, ‘Requirements for a Book about Balanchine’, Washington Dance Review, Winter 1988.

5. Nancy Goldner, interview, September 1985, New York City.

6. Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, May 30, 1977.

7. Arlene Croce, ‘Twyla Tharp’s Red Hot Peppers’, Afterimages pp 393-94

8. Arlene Croce, ‘The Avant-Garde on Broadway’, Afterimages.

9. Arlene Croce, ‘Look What’s Going On’, Afterimages, pp 132-33.

10. Arlene Croce, ‘The Blue Glass Goblet and After’, Afterimages, p53.

11. Marcia Siegel, ‘Siegfried’s Revenge’, Watching the Dance Go By, pp 103-111.

12. Arlene Croce, ‘Love’s Body’, Going to the Dance, pp 392-96.

13. Marcia Siegel, ‘I Can’t Hear the Music’, At the Vanishing Point, p 133.

14. Marcia Siegel, ‘Every Inch A King’, At the Vanishing Point, pp 48-50.

15. Arlene Croce, ‘Ballets Without Choreography’, Afterimages, p 320.

16. Marcia Siegel, ‘Ballet: The Uncertain Establishment’, At the Vanishing Point, p 52.