Dance Writings by Edwin Denby, and: Sight Lines by Arlene Croce (review)

books and company Dance Writings Edwin Denby Alfred A. Knopf; 608 pp.; $40.00 (cloth), $18.95 (paper) Sight Lines Arlene Croce Alfred A. Knopf; 364 pp.; $19.95 (cloth) "Dance criticism has two different aspects," wrote Edwin Denby in 1954, "one is being made drunk by seeing something happen; the other is expressing lucidly what you saw when you were drunk." Unlike so many in the arts, then and now, Denby never got drunk on his power, opinions, or the sound of his voice in print. He went to the dance with immense generosity, relying on a unique sensibility and his dance training to communicate his intoxication with the art. In 1939, he chides with characteristic sweetness those modern dance choreographers and performers who try to "express" things without taking the necessary step of "showing" them first-those who, in other words, hurtle headfirst toward "meaning." Anyone who has ever studied dance knows that meaning comes feetfirst, and so it is with Denby. His method is to show-and show again, with more detail, a new image, a variation-what he saw and felt, until he and his reader (as if talking it through together) reach a shared perception. He never plays favorites, but he has them. For these artists-Balanchine, Markova, and Graham among them-his imagination and prose soar highest. The urgent question in Arlene Croce's Sight Lines is how to preserve the Balanchine legacy. Unlike Mr. B., Denby left an undisputed heir. Croce says she has spent years "combing Denbyisms out of her prose." If her tone is sharper and her style more percussive, more on-top-of-the-beat than 89 Denby's rubato phrasing, it's because there's that much more to assess and correct. Denby, when he was writing in the forties, had a circumscribed beat: two major ballet companies, a regular season, and sporadic offerings from the "moderns." Forty years later Croce has to go all over town to keep up-and put up-not only with the first generation, but also with the proliferation of troupes and cross-pollinating dance forms. On she goes, season after season, covering Farrell and Sankai Juku, Cinderella and Mark Morris, and making reasoned, witty connections among them all. One relishes her prose and responds to her response. Croce always explains her praise and her censure so that, whether or not one agrees with, say, her gloriously unequivocal pan of Pina Bausch, one respects her opinion: she has been open about her prejudices all along. She is, to paraphrase Denby, a critic who tells her reader not what but how to think about a piece of art. And she looks beyond the steps to see how dance functions in American society, something for which Denby had neither the space nor, perhaps, the time. Yet Denby (and Balanchine) largely created that space in our culture Croce writes about. Denby bequeathed to dance criticism a language and a method, however quixotic and inimitable, for seeing and making and measuring dance. James Magruder The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence Susan Letzler Cole Pennsylvania State University Press; 183 pp.; $20.00 (cloth) The concept of ambivalence is central to Susan Cole's useful yoking of mourning ritual and tragedy, but it is her salient virtue that she offers a precise theoretical model which escapes the windier shores of tragic peroration. As she herself notes, hers is not a radical theory: it accords with the positions advanced by such scholar-critics as Richard Sewell, Maynard Mack, and Robert Heilman that dividedness is at the heart of the tragic mystery, that in contrast to melodrama, where one is victorious or defeated, simply guilty or innocent, tragedy evokes a dramatic universe in which defeat is experienced in victory or victory in defeat, where guilt and innocence coexist. What distinguishes Cole's acceptance of this definition is that she roots it in the observable paradoxes of mourning ritual. She asserts that tragedy and mourning each possess "a liminal space or journey or status" and "the presence of the uncanny," as well as shared figures, conflicts, and styles. Cole does not cumulatively parallel mourning ritual and tragic example...