Joan Acocella, 78, cultural critic for the New Yorker

Joan Acocella, a cultural critic whose essays for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books — by turns stylish, erudite, droll, and self-effacing — established her as an indispensable guide to modern dance and literature, died Jan. 7 at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, said her son, Bart Acocella.

Raised in a prim upper-middle-class home in the Bay Area, Ms. Acocella initially planned to become an academic and spent more than a decade working toward a PhD in comparative literature. But soon after moving to Manhattan with her husband, in 1968, she fell under the spell of choreographer George Balanchine, discovering that she could attend New York City Ballet performances free if she joined the ballet guild and worked in the gift shop during intermission.

‘‘Sometimes you hear people say that Balanchine changed their lives, and it sounds like hyperbole, but such a thing can happen,’’ she told Ballet Review magazine in 2016. ‘‘Balanchine did change my life. Within a few years my husband and I had separated, and I had become a dance critic.’’

At publications including the New Yorker, where she served as dance critic from 1998 to 2019, and the New York Review of Books, where she freelanced for more than four decades, Ms. Acocella wrote about dancers and choreographers including Bob Fosse, Suzanne Farrell, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, who endured years of surveillance and repression in the Soviet Union before defecting to the West in 1974.

‘‘Homelessness turned him inward, gave him to himself,’’ she wrote of Baryshnikov’s selfimposed exile. ‘‘Then dance, the substitute home, turned him outward, gave him to us.’’

Ms. Acocella turned outward in her own way, moving from dance to other forms of art and culture, both high and low. She wrote about writer’s block and profanity; the comedy of Richard Pryor and the nuance that James Gandolfini brought to gangster character Tony Soprano; the influence of ‘‘Little Women’’ and the enduring appeal of vampires. The latter characters are often treated as ‘‘a persecuted minority,’’ she observed in 2009: ‘‘Sometimes they are like black people (lynch mobs pursue them), sometimes like homosexuals (rednecks beat them up). Meanwhile, they are trying to go mainstream.’’

Covering dance helped her write about literature, she told the New York Review last year, teaching her ‘‘to stay close to style and tone, and not always to be so intent on the story.’’ At the same time, ‘‘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.’’

Writing about ‘‘Gilgamesh,’’ the world’s oldest long poem, Ms. Acocella suggested that the book was not ‘‘a finished, polished composition . . . but, rather, something more like life, untidy, ambiguous.’’ Profiling Susan Sontag in the New Yorker, she likened the critic first to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then to silent-film star Buster Keaton: ‘‘There they both go, eyes straight ahead, utterly intent on what they’re trying to do — get the girl, understand Communism — and oblivious of the felled houses, the outraged constables that they leave in their wake.’’

David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, described Ms. Acocella in a phone interview as among the most passionate of American critics. ‘‘You’d give her a subject, and then she’d go read 30 books on it and go see every movie that had anything to do with it.’’ He added, ‘‘Every great writer has a voice as distinctive as their fingerprints, and Joan’s voice was just wildly alive with erudition and humor and generosity.’’

The second of three children, Joan Barbara Ross was born in San Francisco on April 13, 1945, and grew up in nearby Oakland. Her father was a cement company executive, her mother a homemaker who signed her up for dance lessons and occasionally took her to the San Francisco Ballet.

Ms. Acocella studied English at the city’s University of California campus. Weeks after she graduated in 1966, she married Nick Acocella, a graduate student who later became an author and political journalist.

Ms. Acocella received her doctorate in comparative literature in 1984 from Rutgers University.

Her marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her son, she leaves her partner, philosopher Noël Carroll; a sister; a brother; and two grandchildren.