General
Arlene Croce, Dance Critic With a Biting Wit, Dies at 90
Writing for The New Yorker, she was both admired and feared, wielding a sometimes merciless pen. Her study of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers drew accolades.
Arlene Croce, who as the dance critic of The New Yorker from 1973 to 1996 was both the most revered and the most feared dance writer in the United States, died on Monday in Johnston, R.I. She was 90.
Her death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by her sister, Marcia Croce.
Ms. Croce was loved for her wit — but not by those she skewered. Her criticism could be wicked, even merciless. She once described the feet of the ballerina Carla Fracci as “flapping along the floor like a loose mudguard.” The choreography of Gerald Arpino, she wrote, was a “love letter from an illiterate all in capitals.”
She made her first big splash in 1972 with “The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book,” a history and assessment of the popular Astaire-Rogers movies, most of them released in the 1930s. Newsweek called it “the best study in popular culture ever written.”
“No one has ever described dance in the movies the way she does,” the film critic Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote of Ms. Croce. “She’s a slangy, elegant writer; her compressed descriptions are evocative and analytic at the same time, and so precise and fresh that while she brings the pleasure of the dances back she adds to it.”
In 1973, when William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, created the dance critic position for Ms. Croce, dance in America had never been more popular, and New York was recognized as its capital.
