Alan M. Kriegsman, Dance Critic, Dies at 84 Alan M. Kriegsman, a longtime dance critic for The Washington Post and the first dance critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, died on Friday at his home in Washington. He was 84. The cause was heart disease, his wife, Sali Ann Kriegsman, a former dance director of the National Endowment of the Arts, said. Mr. Kriegsman worked for The Post from 1966 to 1996, a period of growth and diversification in American dance and expansion in Washington as a center for dance, notably with the opening in 1971 of the Kennedy Center and the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. After joining The Post as a music critic - his training was in musicology and science - Mr. Kriegsman expanded his brief to cover other performing arts and to write about wider cultural issues. He became the paper's dance critic in 1974 and received the Pulitzer for criticism in 1976. Mr. Kriegsman drew on his musical background in many of his dance reviews, whether writing about European and American ballet or the modern-dance choreography of Paul Taylor and Mark Morris. He "watched dancing with a deep, musical eye," Mr. Morris wrote in an e-mail message, adding: "We talked about "swing" (in music and dance) as a necessity and a delight. He had a beautiful voice in speaking and in writing. He had swing."But Mr. Kriegsman was equally receptive to work entirely independent of music, by Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, for example. He also explored the dance forms of India, Spain and Africa. The acting of Laurence Olivier in "The Dance of Death," the emergence of break-dancing, and changes in the nature of the circus were all among his subjects. "The whole field benefited from his work," Mr. Taylor said on Sunday. Alan Mortimer Kriegsman, widely known as Mike, was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 28, 1928. He credited his father, a lawyer, and his mother, an executive secretary, with instilling in him a passion for music (he played piano) and science. After growing up in Far Rockaway, Queens, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia University. He chose to concentrate on music after serving in the Army. His passion for dance, he said, was ignited in 1946 when he saw the ballerina Alicia Markova perform. After receiving a master's degree in music from Columbia in 1953, he held teaching and administration posts at colleges and universities until 1966. He attended the University of Vienna as a Fulbright scholar in 1956 and "57, the year he married Sali Ann Ribakove. Besides his wife, he is survived by a brother.