Her Personal Phrases: Joan Acocella, 1945–2024

For a number of years within the Nineteen Eighties and early ’90s, earlier than her tenure as The New Yorker’s dance critic, Joan Acocella honed her eye and pen as an editor at Dance Journal. Each the attention and the pen have been already famously sharp: Few writers might higher pin down the ineffable, and few appeared happier to argue with the dissidents who wrote letters to the editor.

Tributes to Acocella have abounded since her dying on January 7 at age 78. As our farewell, we’ve gathered right here alternative excerpts from Acocella’s items for Dance Journal.

From “The Bucket Dance Theater…However No Longer on the Backside,” on the corporate now often known as Garth Fagan Dance (March 1986)
What makes the Bucket an necessary firm is Garth Fagan’s kinetic creativeness—the dimensions of emotional and even philosophical fact that he can find and illuminate in pure motion….A lot of Fagan’s choreography rides forwards and backwards between serene moments…the place the soul is joined to the world, and moments of seeming revolt, of breaking free—a dialectic that offers his work an odd, nubbly texture, riddled with pockets of thriller.

From “Swan Lake On Ice,” a overview of New York Metropolis Ballet’s spring season, discussing the reconstruction of Paul Taylor’s authentic solo in George Balanchine’s Episodes (November 1986)
The solo reveals choreographic and psychological pressure on the level of close to breakdown. Peter Body’s physique (which seems to be rather a lot like that of the younger Paul Taylor) takes stab after stab at sense—extensions, uprightness—and each stab misses. The arms retract, the physique falls right into a crouch, and the fingers seize the legs from the skin, then from the within, then crossed-over. To make issues worse, the toes then go into relevé, hoisting this tangle insecurely into the air. Between problems, Body squints up into the highlight, like a bug caught within the beam of a flashlight. What’s being mentioned right here is sort of unsayable: one thing comical, pathetic, and very horrid about human life. Then darkness, then the Ricercata and the ballerina, to comb the skein.

From “Ashton and Anniversaries,” a overview of The Joffrey Ballet at New York Metropolis Middle (March 1987)
Like the youngsters of a superb mom, [Frederick] Ashton’s characters are free to play, to vary, to commit sins and follies with out being harshly punished. Many individuals have written concerning the ethical generosity of [La Fille Mal Gardée]: how Widow Simone, although foiled, is just not shamed, and above all how Alain, in returning on the finish after the marriage social gathering has departed and joyously reclaiming his beloved pink umbrella, is de facto given the final chuckle. I believe, although, that this generosity is merely a part of the environment of freedom that permeates the ballet. As a result of nature goes to make issues okay, Ashton doesn’t have to fret about that. Subsequently he doesn’t must hold observe each minute of who’s proper and who’s improper, and what “type” of individuals they’re….Throughout the limits of comedian conference, every character is its personal little horn of a lot.

From “Armies of Angels,” a overview of American Ballet Theatre’s Metropolitan Opera Home season (September 1987)
Hailing from the libido-and-aggression college of recent ballet, Kenneth MacMillan appeared, at first, a harmful option to stage American Ballet Theatre’s new Sleeping Magnificence. Would we get one other a type of “trendy psychological” classics? Would Carabosse be discovered to have some deeper motivation for her evil? (Oh God, what concerning the spindle?) But MacMillan has produced a grand and decorous staging, with virtually no psychology of any kind, however with uniformly wonderful dancing….

It was additionally stylistically constant—a essential level within the case of this work. The Sleeping Magnificence is an authoritarian ballet. Its court docket stands for the order of the world, a mirror of heaven’s, and, as in heaven, all that’s to occur is foretold, within the Lilac Fairy’s prophecy on the finish of the Prologue. Nevertheless distant this ancien régime could appear to us now, it might probably nonetheless communicate to us of issues that we prize: concord, readability, and grandeur. However the medium of that communication is the tutorial method. Settlement on that, stylistically, equals settlement on the world of this ballet; classicism as a method of dancing equals classicism as a method of seeing the world. ABT’s dancers agreed and, in doing so, created that environment of candy safety wherein the classical dream—that fact is straightforward, knowable, and delightful—might, for 3 hours, come true.

The manufacturing, then, is in some measure a celebration of American Ballet Theatre. Is it additionally a celebration of Aurora’s birthday, and her marriage ceremony? Not but. As I mentioned, the ballet is sort of devoid of psychology, and that features any look of human ease or naturalness. Why are the courtiers so faceless? Why do the fairies put on frozen grins? Why does the Lilac Fairy act like a sorority rush chairman? MacMillan made his identify as a realist and positively, on the proof of his Mayerling, would appear to consider that aristocrats are human too. It’s as if, there being no incest or homicide in The Sleeping Magnificence, he determined that it was merely not amenable to realism and gave up on that rating altogether.

From “In Search of Sacre,” on Millicent Hodson’s reconstruction of Le Sacre du Printemps for The Joffrey Ballet (November 1987)
The unique Sacre might have been extra mystical in tone than we’ve been led to consider. (Stravinsky later mentioned that “The Coronation of Spring” would have been a extra correct translation of the title than “The Ceremony of Spring.”) It’s fairly doubtless that the critics and different witnesses of 1913 confused its brutality on the expense of its exalted character, for the brutality is what would have struck them most forcibly. They weren’t used to seeing “ugliness” onstage….If we discover the reconstruction much less brutal than the legend, this will probably be no shock. Will we get pink within the face and storm out of the image galleries once we see a cubist canvas by Picasso? Folks in 1913 did.

I believe that there will probably be controversy about this reconstruction and that the controversy will probably be plenty of enjoyable. It is going to even be irresolvable. For there may be little hope of separating the “true” ballet from the historic and particular person vagaries of notion. Was it the scene of primal terror that [the critic Jacques] Rivière, for instance, noticed, or was it, as Hodson says, the wedding of earth and sky? Whose Ceremony is true?

Alternatively, the reconstruction might find yourself trying simply as the unique is alleged to have regarded. And the ballet might come down on us like a ton of bricks, simply because it did on the viewers of 1913.

From “Balancing Act,” on ABT’s Met season (October 1990)
All through [Twyla Tharp’s] work…there are marauding bands. And all through, there’s a childlike fascination with being cool, with mastering laborious issues—ballet, for instance—to the purpose the place they’re made to look simple, informal, like nothing. Lastly, as an extension of that, there’s a preoccupation with order and dysfunction. Time and again, Tharp will create a scene of chaos which then—snap! on one beat—will reveal an underlying order….

For years she was in a position along with her personal firm to mix her two loves of order and dysfunction—how cool and free these Tharp dancers have been! and on the similar time, how sharp-footed—however as soon as she met Baryshnikov, he raised the ante on either side. For he was a ballet dancer—that’s, a practitioner of a method whose very foundation was the concept of concord—and moreover, essentially the most good ballet dancer on the earth, an artist of breathtaking precision and probity. Had she sought the world over for a picture of order, she couldn’t have discovered a greater one than he. And what did he need? The identical as she: to problem order with dysfunction, the previous days with the brand new, being European and excellent with being American and funky.

From “Wake-up Name,” a overview of Peter Martins’ Sleeping Magnificence at New York Metropolis Ballet (September 1991)
In [Darci Kistler and Kyra Nichols] New York Metropolis Ballet has what no different firm, worldwide, has at this second: two really nice ballerinas. Nichols is the stronger technically, however technical mastery is merely the bottom on which she builds her artwork. That artwork lies within the subtlety of her phrasing….Her small steps are small and excellent—seed pearls. Large steps, when she needs to make them large, are big. She will knock off pirouettes à la seconde as if she have been hitting homers out of the park, 4 in a row. She is not any actress, however in her dancing alone there are a thousand dramas….

[Kistler’s] nice reward, unmatched by another dancer at this time, is the grand impulse with which she weaves area into time….When, in her variation within the [Sleeping Beauty] grand pas de deux, she raises her arms increased and better, the picture expands in your thoughts, telling you Aurora’s future. She isn’t just elevating her arms; she is elevating flowers, elevating her youngsters, elevating her bed room curtains on a lifetime of sunny days. Nichols takes you inward, and also you discover a complete world. Kistler takes you outward, and also you discover a complete world.