I don’t know how I missed it, but I just discovered yesterday, in the January 16, 2025 New York Review of Books, that Arlene Croce died last month. She was 90.
Croce was The New Yorker’s dance critic from 1973 to 1996. I’m not a fan of ballet. But I do love movies. Croce wrote one of the great movie studies – The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (1972). Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, Shall We Dance – if you love these movies, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Croce’s book. Here are a few samples:
Two big Cossacks have to carry him protesting onto the dance floor, and there he does his longest and most absorbing solo of the series so far, full of stork-legged steps on toe, wheeling pirouettes in which he seems to be winding one leg around the other, and those ratcheting tap clusters that fall like loose change from his pockets.
Later on in the film there’s a dance reprise, the first formal romantic adagio to be created by Astaire for himself and Rogers – and for the beautiful supple back that let her arch from his arms like a black lily. The dance is almost humble in its brevity and simplicity – a few walking steps, a sudden plunge, a silky recovery, and it’s over. But the spell that blooms while you are watching it is powerful, and there are astonishing moments, like his very tender gesture of pressing her head to his shoulder as they walk.
The dance is one of their simplest and most daring, the steps mostly walking steps done with a slight retard. The withheld impetus makes the dance look dragged by destiny, all the quick little circling steps pulled as if on a single thread.
What I find most moving in this noble and almost absurdly glamorous dance is the absence of self-enchantment in the performance. Astaire and Rogers yield nothing to Garbo’s throat or Pavlova’s Swan as icons of the sublime, yet their manner is brisk. Briskly they immolate themselves.
Croce was a superb describer of dance. She’s gone now. But her enchanting The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book endures.
Credit: The above photo of Arlene Croce is by Duane Michals.
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