My friend Joan Acocella (1945-2024)

I.

For many of us, Joan Acocella was one of those few critics whose every piece we needed to read as soon as they were in print. You could certainly disagree with her, you could certainly feel her latest piece wasn’t her best, but her writing voice seemed invariably to exude infectious charm, good sense, keen intelligence, and high vitality. It made you feel more human.

In the weeks that followed her death, I found myself using the adjective “hearty” about her and her work. That adjective certainly didn’t say enough about her - but for me it still says plenty. All the critics I admire have written with heart, but, for me, Joan remains the only one whose work took heart into real heartiness, something that, in her, was both engaging and lovable.

I first met Joan in summer 1985, in London, but briefly; I met her again in summer 1987, in New York, when we were speaking on a panel about “The Sleeping Beauty” at the Dance Critics Association conference. But we truly became friends in 1988, when I returned to New York for six months, reviewing dance for “The New Yorker” and when she was writing once a week for a new weekly New York magazine called “7 Days”. It’s a source of lasting regret that “7 Days” survived only two years: Joan was not its only valuable writer (Peter Schjeldahl was its art critic, for example), but it was there that she first showed the world the full charm of her writing voice. I remember that the fans of her “7 Days” pieces included Arlene Croce, David Vaughan, and Bob Gottlieb, Claudia Roth Pierpont, Mindy Aloff and myself. Mindy chose four of them for her marvellous 2018 anthology “Dance in America”; I saved all Joan’s “7 Days” pieces - including the ones on shopping at Balducci’s and attending a concert of Bruce Springsteen, who was then in his thirties - and I believe my collection of them is now in the Library at Lincoln Center. Go read them all there, but meanwhile read or re-read those included in “Dance in America”.

As I remember, some of Joan’s other finest writing on dance was for “Art in America”. And by the way, you really don’t know the full spell of Joan’s writing about dance until you’ve read her 1979 debut essay in “Dance Magazine”: “On Being a Nutcracker Mother”. Her beloved son Bart had played Fritz in the Balanchine production; and Joan’s account of all the facets of “Nutcracker” parenthood perfectly introduces us to the Joan Acocella voice, which felt like something you could taste and touch and spend time with over dinner.

Joan and I formed the kind of friendship that soon included going to the cinema together and talking about our families. One evening, she rang me after a performance, to tell me she thought that Bart, her son, maybe had a girlfriend in his room. It was so like Joan that she could immediately share this with me, communicating her suspicion with a certain glee (she adored Bart) but also with delicacy (how should a mother handle these moments?). Margot Fonteyn said that Frederick Ashton was “a very human human being”; Joan was the same, the most human of all dance critics. Over the years, I met her mother and two siblings in California; she met my parents and brothers and sisters-in-law in England. We travelled together to Amsterdam, Paris, Avignon and Arles; we shared an apartment in a Los Angeles university, we met in San Francisco, Boston, and Washington DC, and we stayed together in the same hotels in Brussels and other cities, sometimes even sharing a room. Once we turned up to dinner with friends in Brussels but we couldn’t really speak, because we both kept bursting into tears: we’d been watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV, and couldn’t get over it.

In 1995, we spent two weeks together in Naples and Sicily, looking at churches and paintings and Greek remains and much more. Joan spoke excellent Italian. Her knowledge of Renaissance and baroque architecture was thrilling, and full of passion - she was part of my discovery of Antonello da Messina - but so was her enthusiasm for Italian food. She never returned to Sicily after that holiday, whereas that for me was the first of at least ten holidays there - and yet to this day I still can’t think of cannoli con ricotta or Sicilian melanzane without hearing the enthusiasm in Joan’s voice. Of course we also laughed and gossiped for hours; in memory, some of the laughter we shared then was the best laughter of my life. Maybe the last time I saw her, twenty-seven years later, we remembered how, on our last night in Sicily, we had been soaked by a downpour and watched Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis (“Great Balls of Fire”) on TV from my bed. Such glee.

Laughter was also part of our friendship across the Atlantic. (I have never had more fun with a fax machine that in the naughty messages Joan and I shared.)

II.

In New York, our friendship was something we soon shared with Arlene Croce. Arlene, whom Joan and I admired so greatly, could certainly be standoffish (an adjective with which Joan teased her), and it was her initial inclination to observe Joan cautiously from a distance. She, Arlene, had told me in 1987 that Joan was to be watched carefully because she was half real critic, and half academic intellectual; Arlene alaays mistrusted intellectuals, even though many felt she was one herself. (For her, an intellectual was one who placed ideas above feeling.) But Joan and I were friends, and the energy of Joan’s charm broke down Arlene’s reserve. One evening in May 1988, after a Mark Morris programme at the Brooklyn Academy, we were all talking with such heat that Arlene asked Joan and me back to her apartment. To the two of them, that evening, I read aloud the whole of my long essay on New York City Ballet’s American Music Festival, then in proof stage; they were the most receptive listeners in the world. A great deal of Scotch was drunk - and I, who had been working nonstop on that essay for days, passed out. The two women undressed me - which cemented their friendship - and I woke up in the morning on Arlene’s recliner in her sitting room.

From then on, the three of us formed a very warm and affectionate friendship, spending time together in New York and Brussels and London and Washington D.C., watching movies and listening to symphonies and opera and even string quartets, over some nine years. Above all, we dined together, with Joan and myself drawing Arlene out about Balanchine and much else. Joan’s book on Willa Cather was very much her own work - but it had grown out of the impetus of Arlene’s enthusiasm for Cather.

I’m proud to say that I also helped Joan to become friends at that time with Bob Gottlieb, then editor-in-chief of “The New Yorker”. Probably she and he would have soon become friends anyway, but I keenly remember the Lincoln Center performance after which Arlene, he, Joan, and I all dined. Joan was on top form, and those three together were even funnier than they were apart. Joan began to write for “The New Yorker” while he was running it; and then it was Tina Brown, his successor, who made Joan part of the “New Yorker” team.

III.

At “The New Yorker”, Joan’s writing about books and other non-dance matters was often astonishing - wise, witty, analytical, full of humanity. I’m currently re-reading her posthumous collection, “The Bloodied Nightgown”. I read it with total delight in 2024; now I’m reading it with even greater admiration in 2025. And her range is breathtaking.

I feel guilty in saying that Joan’s best writing on dance was not in this century and not for “The New Yorker” - though I’m by no means alone in this. Somewhere between 1998, when she took over from Arlene as dance critic to “The New Yorker” and 2002, Joan started to become reluctant to attend dance with anything like her former frequency. Several of her friends and admirers spent time wondering what caused this reluctance. Sometimes it seemed an inheritance from Arlene, who had deep streaks of pessimism and impatience and who after 1984 had begun to go to fewer and fewer performances. Some people felt that Joan had developed agoraphobia and could only face theatregoing with the help of medication. Who can say? But I do say - as did many - that Joan’s response to dance lost much of its former spontaneity and analytical acuity. She often went in for entertaining hyperbole, but the enthusiasm in her writing wasn’t one she often expressed in private. Her dance pieces were now assignments - she often spoke about striving to fulfil her quota of pieces for the magazine - and there were several dance artists whom, having praised in “The New Yorker”, she never went to watch again, such as the Suzanne Farrell Ballet and Gabriel Missé. Writing on books, however, she was more truly herself, and more full of her own deep wisdom.

Many of Joan’s best friendships did not last more than their initial ten years. That was true of my friendship with her too, except that we then were able to develop a second phase of friendship, less close and less high-spirited, but nonetheless informed by experience and memory. Between 2007 and 2018, when I worked again in New York for the “New York Times”, Joan and I would meet at performances, of course. But we would also have dinner together, maybe three times a year - often at Le Zie, near her apartment in Chelsea. We had become very different critics, but so what? We didn’t often talk about dance. Our mothers both died around the same time in autumn 2010, which gave us plenty to share, the more so since we had met each other’s families twenty years before. And we had friends in common, some of them difficult New York people about whom we needed to offload. Sometimes we were joined by Noël Carroll, with whom she had begun to live; but it was when he didn’t join us that she praised him with a warmth and an esteem she saved for nobody else.

The last email Joan sent me (July 2023) was about a European city we had loved together and about its food:

“Dear A —

“I send you this <a link to something about pizzas in Naples> because you were the one who took me to the place where I had my first real Neapolitan pizza: small, margherita, very bumpy crust, in the city of Naples.

“XX Joan”

Do I need to tell you that I now long to return to Naples and to eat another of its pizzas just to commemorate the gloriously human Joan Acocella? Dear Joan, thank you for enriching my life - much love, Alastair.