In memoriam: Joan Acocella

Image source: New York Review of Books

Joan Acocella, a longtime writer for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, died on Sunday 7 January at her home in New York City. She published several books; if you'd like a taste of her essays and reviews, I recommend Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon/Vintage, 2007), which covers her literary, historical and (especially) dance interests.

Image source: Biblio

It is as a dance critic that I think Acocella will be longest remembered. Dance is concrete, since it is made up of the movements of individual bodies, but is also abstract: what does a particular movement, especially in non-narrative modern dance, actually mean? Acocella had the rare ability to write descriptively and critically about specific dance works and their creators in a way understandable to those of us who haven't mastered technical ballet vocabulary. She had taken ballet lessons for many years, and later studied literature at university. As she said in a 2023 interview in the New York Review of Books,

. . .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.

Two examples will have to suffice, representing many. In her last review for the NYRB, of a recent two-volume biography by Jennifer Homans of George Balanchine, Acocella wrote of Balanchine that, "like Mozart, he often gladdens your heart in order, then, to break it, whereupon, in the next movement, he tells us that we have to go on living anyway." This is a brilliant encapsulation both of Mozart's work, and Balanchine's. And in her final interview with the NYRB, published in conjunction with the review, she was asked about special relationships between dancers and choreographers, such as that of Suzanne Farrell and Balanchine. She responded in part, "Mikhail Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp. She made pieces that were about him as a dancer. The more she did that, the more he worked on those gifts, and she then carried that style—a combination of a kind of skepticism and thoughtfulness, extreme virtuosity combined with a certain declining modesty—over to other dancers, and indeed to her ensemble. You could say they were destined to find each other, and each brought a great deal that was fresh to the other."

The Acocella work that had the biggest impact on me was her critical biography of the choreographer and dancer Mark Morris, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1993.

Image source: Biblio

At the time Morris was not an obvious choice for book-length treatment: he was only 37, and there were many other more established choreographers in the New York dance world who had not yet had full-length studies written about them. (To take a few names at random: Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean, Eliot Feld, Robert Joffrey, Lar Lubovitch, and Twyla Tharp.) Also, the Mark Morris Dance Group had recently had a setback: its contract as the resident company at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels was not renewed in 1991 after only three years. Morris's predecessor at La Monnaie, Maurice Béjart, choreographed there for nearly three decades; Morris and his dancers had been regularly and lustily booed.

We'd first encountered Morris as a dancer and choreographer for the White Oak Dance Project, where one of his collaborators was Mikhail Baryshnikov. My boss generously gave me his tickets to a November 1991 White Oak performance in Berkeley when it turned out that he was not able to go (afterwards we were so grateful we paid him in full). We were mainly eager to see Baryshnikov, who was indeed an utterly compelling performer. But Morris's work as a choreographer and as a graceful and charismatic dancer were the evening's greatest surprises, and my partner and I decided that any time Morris returned to the Bay Area we would buy tickets.

As it turned out, Morris came back the following season with the MMDG. We were astonished by the range of tone, movement, and music represented in his dances, from the urgent questioning of Gloria (set to Vivaldi) to the funny, lewd, and touching Going Away Party (set to the music of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys). Morris immediately became our favorite living choreographer.

Mark Morris Dance Group in Gloria. Photo credit: Stephanie Berger. Image source: Mark Morris Dance Company

Acocella's book on Morris came out the next year. It told the story of Morris's unconventional upbringing in Seattle, his early commitment to dancing and training with Verla Flowers, his tours as a teenager with the Koleda Folk Dance ensemble, his move to New York in 1975 at the age of 19, and the formation of his company in 1980 when he was 24. All of this was fascinating, but most remarkable was the book's description of Morris's time in Brussels. His work was rejected, even reviled, by Belgian audiences. As Acocella later wrote in the introduction to Twenty-Eight Artists,

. . .Morris was received with scorn. The reviews were sulfurous; the shows were howled at. When Morris came out to take his curtain calls, the booing practically raised the roof. And he smiled and bowed and acted as though the audience were throwing bouquets at him. Then he went back to his studio, and for the three-year term of his contract—which almost anyone else, in his situation, would have canceled—he created a number of the greatest American dance works of the late twentieth century. (p. xviii)

Among these works were L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (set to Handel's oratorio), Dido and Aeneas (a danced version of Purcell's opera), and The Hard Nut (Morris's highly entertaining—and funny, lewd, and touching—version of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker). Acocella described each of these works, and many others, in vivid and insightful detail. 

And thanks to Cal Performances' visionary director Robert Cole, all of these works (as well as Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and Rameau's Platée, both operas directed and choreographed by Morris) were brought to Berkeley, along with other MMDG programs, over the next few seasons. After Dido and Aeneas we immediately determined that we would not only see every Mark Morris program, we would buy tickets to two separate performances each time (a practice we kept up for two decades). While our interest in Morris was initially sparked by my boss's generosity, Acocella's writing added depth and understanding to our enjoyment. Mark Morris changed our lives, and Joan Acocella helped us to see the full complexity, richness, and humor of his works. We will always be deeply grateful.

Jenn Weddel, Stacy Martorana and Rita Donahue in L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato.
Photo credit: Kevin Yatarola. Image source: DanceTabs