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Joan Acocella, a cultural critic whose erudite, elegant essays about dance and literature appeared in The New Yorker<\/a> and The New York Review of Books over four decades,<\/a> died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.<\/p>\n Her son, Bartholomew Acocella, said the cause was cancer. <\/p>\n Ms. Acocella (pronounced ack-ah-CHELL-uh) wrote deftly and deeply about dancers and choreographers, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell and George Balanchine. She scrutinized the vicissitudes of the New York City Ballet as well as the feats of the ballroom-dancing pros and celebrity oafs of the popular TV series, \u201cDancing With the Stars.\u201d<\/p>\n She was The New Yorker\u2019s dance critic from 1998 to 2019 and freelanced for The Review for 33 years, including her final articles for the publication, a two-part commentary on \u201cMr. B: George Balanchine\u2019s 20th Century,\u201d by Jennifer Homans, her successor as The New Yorker\u2019s dance critic.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat she wrote for us,\u201d Emily Greenhouse, the editor of The Review, said in an email, \u201cwas often mischievous and always delicious \u2014 on crotch shots and cuss words, on Neapolitan hand gestures and Isadora Duncan\u2019s emphasis on the solar plexus \u2014 in addition to Nijinsky and Donald Antrim and Marilynne Robinson.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Acocella accompanied Mr. Baryshnikov to his birthplace, Riga, Latvia, for his first performances anywhere in the former Soviet Union since his defection in 1974 while on tour in Canada.<\/p>\n Dancing Twyla Tharp\u2019s \u201cPergolesi\u201d at the Latvian National Opera, Mr. Baryshnikov \u201cgave them double barrel turns, he gave them the triple pirouettes in attitude (and then he switched to the other leg and did two more),\u201d Ms. Acocella wrote in The New Yorker in 1998<\/a>. \u201cHe rose like a piston; he landed like a lark. He took off like Jerry Lee Lewis; he finished like Jane Austen. From ledge to ledge of the dance he leapt, sure-footed, unmindful, a man in love.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Acocella was often trying to determine what made artists like Mr. Baryshnikov so successful. It 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhat<\/em> will they become?\u201d she recalled thinking about their futures, when she wrote the introduction to her book \u201cTwenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints\u201d (2007), a collection of essays and reviews.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere are many brilliant artists \u2014 they are born every day \u2014 but those who end up having sustained artistic careers are not necessarily the most gifted,\u201d she wrote, adding that they were \u201cthe ones who combined brilliance with more homely virtues: patience, resilience, courage.\u201d<\/p>\n Reviewing Ms. Acocella\u2019s book for The New York Times, the novelist Kathryn Harrison described the author<\/a> as a \u201ckeen and sympathetic observer of the ways in which corrosive disappointment can strip away the veneer of culture and refinement that an immature artist typically acquires, revealing the more genuine sensitivity, the art, beneath.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Acocella also wrote extensively about literature \u2014 often lengthy biographical dives blended with criticism for The New Yorker and The Review. The authors she wrote about ranged from Dante and Chaucer to Carlo Collodi, the pen name for Carlo Lorenzini who wrote \u201cAdventures of Pinocchio<\/a>\u201d in 1883, and Agatha Christie.<\/p>\n After reading all of Dame Agatha\u2019s detective novels, Ms. Acocella examined the modes of murder splattered across her 66 books.<\/p>\n \u201cNow and then,\u201d she wrote in 2010,<\/a> \u201cthe victim is shot or stabbed, and poor Agnes, the one stored with the tennis racquets, had a skewer driven through her brain, but Christie favored a clean conking on the head or \u2014 her overwhelming preference \u2014 poison.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But, she added, \u201cPoison probably appealed to her also because it did not involve assault. Christie disliked violence.\u201d<\/p>\n Joan Barbara Ross was born on April 13, 1945, in San Francisco, and grew up in nearby Oakland. Her father, Arnold, was an executive of a cement company. Her mother, Florence (Hartzell) Ross, was a homemaker. As a girl, Joan took ballet lessons.<\/p>\n She received a bachelor\u2019s degree in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D in comparative literature in 1984 from Rutgers University. The subject of her dissertation was how artists and intellectuals in Paris and London reacted to Serge Diaghilev\u2019s Ballets Russes during its first five years, from 1909 to 1914.<\/p>\n Soon after moving to New York City, she began attending performances of the New York City Ballet once a year. But in the late 1970s, she learned that if she paid $50 to join the ballet company\u2019s guild \u2014 and worked in the gift shop during intermission \u2014 she could see as many shows as she wanted.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes you hear people say that Balanchine changed their lives, and it sounds like hyperbole, but such a thing can happen,\u201d she told the quarterly Ballet Review in 2016. \u201cWithin a few years, my husband and I had separated, and I had become a dance critic.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Through most of the 1970s, Ms. Acocella was an editor and writer at Random House, where she and two other authors wrote what became a successful textbook about abnormal psychology, which produced income for her through several revised editions over the next two decades.<\/p>\n In the 1980s, she became a senior critic at Dance Magazine. One of her early articles was about her son Bart performing as Fritz in the New York City Ballet\u2019s \u201cNutcracker.\u201d She was later the book review editor at Dance Research Journal and the lead dance critic of 7 Days, the short-lived weekly magazine. Then, in the 1990s, she wrote dance criticism for The Daily News of New York, Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1993 and two years later, she was hired as a staff writer at The New Yorker.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was no greater experience,\u201d David Remnick, the magazine\u2019s editor, said by phone, \u201cthan 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In addition to her essays, Ms. Acocella wrote several books, including \u201cWilla Cather and the Politics of Criticism\u201d (2000), which grew out of an essay in The New Yorker, and \u201cMark Morris\u201d (1993), about the brash, self-assured dancer and choreographer.<\/p>\n Reviewing the Morris book in The New York Times, John Rockwell called it<\/a> a \u201cdeft blend of biography, dance history, backstage detail and critical analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n A new collection of Ms. Acocella\u2019s literary writings, \u201cThe Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays,\u201d is to be published this year.<\/p>\n She said that her literature and dance writing fed each other.<\/p>\n