City Center's Fall for Dance

[Alexandra]

Flipsy has reviewed two of the programs for us (thank you!) Did others go to this one? It was a great chance to see a lot of different kinds of dance.

There are three reviews (two by Nancy Dalva and one by Susan Reiter) on DanceView Times this week:

Falling in Love - Nancy Dalva

The other two numbers on the second night's bill were novel to me—and I just adored them, which to me justified the entire festival proposition right there. To attend in order to see something one already liked quite a bit, and in the process discover something new—well, how great is that? "Ordinary Festivals" has the feel of that marvelous musical "Most Happy Fella" . It is some sort of harvest celebration, with music by "Nuova Compangia de Canto Populare" that makes you want to book passage to Italy in time for the grape harvest. The conceit of the number involves many, many, oranges—first tossed by the cast to the choreographers, Sara Person and Patrik Widrig, who catch them on knives. There follow a fabulous stomping and jumping dance on a carpet, lots of rolling and running, and more fun with fruit. Everyone wears Widrig's black and white costumes right out of the Sicilian segments of "The Godfather," and the whole thing is entirely agreeable and entertaining, and the oranges smell wonderful, though one wonders what the piece is like at full evening length. At the least, I'd like to find out.

The Old and the New - Susan Reiter

Peter Boal's performance of the "Episodes" solo was certainly one of the week's major highlights—perhaps it will be re-inserted into the full work at New York City Ballet, as it was briefly in the late 1980s when Mr. Taylor reworked it for Peter Frame. This can be added to the list of other sublime performances by Mr. Boal of landmark roles in white costumes, such as "Apollo" and "Pergolesi." He was performing it here for the first time, and delivered its knotty, questioning moves —some of which evoke an insect unfolding its tentacles—with luminous authority and intensely focused commitment. He didn't over-emphasize its strangeness, but allowed its nervous, quirky quality to make its own statement, and his brief bursts of purer, more elegant dancing gleamed brightly within the choreography's darker edgy premise.

Connections - Nancy Dalva

With any luck, about a year from now there will be another New York City Center Fall for Dance Festival, so here's a heads up: Go every night. See it all. You'll probably discover a company or two you didn't know about before, and find correspondences, whether vital or novel, among the various entries you already knew. You will be invigorated by the festival crowd, who come early and hang around late in the disco bar set up in the adjacent pass-through from 55th to 56th Streets. If you've spend years of nights in dance audiences, you'll run into practically everyone you know and haven't seen in ages at the intermission. You'll catch up. If you're a naysayer, you'll find fellow naysayers, and have your own kind of fun. (If you're lucky, you'll find yourself seated next to an enthusiastic Barnard student, or a shrewd novice writer, or a perceptive Bucknell graduate studying arts marketing, and gain some new perspective.) Over six nights, your life will pass before your eyes on stage and in the lobby, and you will know that people love to see dance.

Some of it will drive you nuts, because, as the festival producer, City Center President and CEO Arlene Shuler writes in her program welcome, the "programs have been created so there will be something for everyone—dance aficionados and first-time dance goers alike." Obviously, no one person is everyone, and some of the thirty works won't be your thing. ( I, for example, have no interest whatsoever in dance as social anthropology, though formal excellence of any kind appeals to me, and thus I adored Parul Shah and Dancers, whose work is based on Kathak dance.) Actually, despite the credo, it felt more as if there were something from everyone, and from everywhere, than something for everyone on these programs. (And anyway, I would demur from the notion that neophytes must be appealed to with what's obvious.) There also was a boiler-plate-ish-ness to the evenings which was altogether understandable, but did suggest a truly dedicated political correctness as a driving force in the programming.