When Critic vs. Choreographer Ignited a Cultural Firestorm

Thirty years ago, Bill T. Jones presented “Still/Here,” and the critic Arlene Croce responded with an explosive essay. Now the work is returning to the Brooklyn Academy.

It landed like a bomb.

“Discussing the Undiscussable,” a 1994 New Yorker essay by the dance critic Arlene Croce, started off with a sentence that blew the minds of many: “I have not seen Bill T. Jones’s ‘Still/Here’ and have no plans to review it.”

But she did decide to write about the work, which was inspired by people living with terminal illness, including AIDS. (Jones was H.I.V. positive.) In her contentious essay, Croce, one of the finest dance critics of the 20th century, railed against what she called victim art: “By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism. I think of him as literally undiscussable — the most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and martyrs.”

“Still/Here,” which premiered in France and opened at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1994, was set into motion by a series of survival workshops that Jones held with people with life-threatening diseases. (There were no dying people onstage in the production.) Croce’s essay brought fame to the dance and its creator. And by working exasperated outrage into her act, she opened up dance and criticism to the masses.

For Jones, who said the essay was like having scalding water poured on him, it means he and Croce are forever linked. “I don’t want to think about her,” Jones, 72, said in an interview. “But unfortunately she and I are wed. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

Croce, 90, was not available for comment. The art critic Jed Perl, a good friend, said she “has always stood by her view of ‘Still/Here.’”