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| Joan Acocella | |
Joan Acocella, a cultural critic and author "whose elegant, erudite essays about dance and literature appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books for more than four decades," died January 7, the New York Times reported. She was 78.
Acocella was the New Yorker's dance critic from 1998 to 2019 and freelanced for the NYRB for 33 years. Her final articles for the Review were a two-part commentary on the biography Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century by Jennifer Homans, her successor as the New Yorker's dance critic.
"What she wrote for us was often mischievous and always delicious--on crotch shots and cuss words, on Neapolitan hand gestures and Isadora Duncan's emphasis on the solar plexus," said Emily Greenhouse, editor of the Review.
Acocella was interested in what made artists like Mikhail Baryshnikov so successful. The Times noted that this was "a search that began when she moved to New York City with her husband, Nicholas Acocella, in 1968 and became friendly with a group of young artists who awed her."
In the introduction to her book Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (2007), she recalled thinking about their futures. "What will they become?" she wrote, adding: "There are many brilliant artists--they are born every day--but those who end up having sustained artistic careers are not necessarily the most gifted." They were "the ones who combined brilliance with more homely virtues: patience, resilience, courage."
Through most of the 1970s, Acocella was an editor and writer at Random House, where she and two other authors wrote what became a successful textbook about abnormal psychology. Several revised editions produced income for her over the next two decades, the Times wrote. She also wrote extensively about literature for the New Yorker and the Review.
In the 1980s, she became a senior critic at Dance magazine, and was later the book review editor at Dance Research Journal and the lead dance critic of 7 Days weekly magazine. In the 1990s, she wrote dance criticism for the Daily News in New York, Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
New Yorker editor David Remnick said, "There was no greater experience than going to a dance performance with her and watching the occasional urgent note being taken, and then her mouth agape with wonder, but also the occasional eye roll."
Acocella wrote several books, including Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2000) and Mark Morris (1993). A new collection of her writings on literature, The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays, will be published by FSG this year.
In an interview with the Review, Acocella said that her literature and dance writing fed each other: "I've written most about 19th and early 20th century literature, and boy, did those people have stories. But ballet, because it is fundamentally abstract, taught me to stay close to style and tone, and not always to be so intent on the story. Conversely, literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life, in dance, too--how people behave toward one another, and what they take from and give to one another."