Arlene Croce, Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker (University Press of Florida, $24.95 paper). After Edwin Denby’s Dance Writings and Poetry, this 2000 anthology of Croce’s New Yorker reviews is the best single-author collection of dance criticism in print, a volume indispensable to anyone who wants to understand ballet and modern dance in the Seventies and Eighties. Comprehensively informed and passionately, sometimes exasperatingly opinionated, these pieces are now part of history. They’re also sumptuously well written, and I can testify from personal experience that even if you’ve never seen a ballet, they’ll make you want to go right out and discover George Balanchine and Paul Taylor and Mark Morris. I did (TT).
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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