Arlene Croce was born in Providence, Rhode Island. She was the founding editor of Ballet Review and has been the dance critic at The New Yorker since 1973. She has published The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, and two volumes of dance criticism—Afterimages, and Going to the Dance—and is currently at work on a book on Balanchine’s ballets. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. New York leads the world in dance, and not only in the modern dance, where the strength of a native tradition has been unquestioned for forty years; we also have the best ballet—the soundest in schooling, the most artistically distinguished—of any that currently exist. True, the creativity that produced this supremacy is past or passing. But so is the struggle for recognition which marked the careers of the older generation of American dancers. On the gifts of this generation American dance rose from penury and insignificance to the pre-eminence it now enjoys. It also possesses a measure of public support and, in ballet at least, an institutional status recognized the (Western) world over. This is all new power, and in the dimming lustre of the Golden Age the future looks bright enough. At any rate, no other world capital has what New York has in dance, or the potential to acquire it.
Genuine leaders are rare in dance.
2. Genuine leaders are rare in dance. Two of the most promising are Mark Morris and Garth Fagan, and neither, as
