Concept Versus Content At ‘Fall for Dance’

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The New York Sun

It was above all the concept, the organizing principle, rather than the individual performances on view that emerged triumphant at City Center’s opening night “Fall for Dance” program last Thursday. In 1943, the city reopened the former Masonic temple on West 56th Street as a venue for popular priced ballet, drama, and opera, and now “Fall for Dance” returns City Center to its populist roots, offering audiences diverse programs for a uniform $10.

But the performances must be judged regardless of programming strategies, and there was merit to the performance fare itself. First on the program was South Korea’s Yi-Jo Lim Sum Dance Company, performing “Heaven and Earth,” a new piece that was most effective when most traditional: Whenever indigenous dance forms are slicked-up and commercialized they attain something of the ersatz; that was true here as well. The troupe’s performers were skilled and they were decorative, wearing some ravishing costumes — as well as some that were on the gaudy side.

Next, Julie Gardette and François Rousseau of the Dutch National Ballet came together, only to come apart, in “Before After,” a duet by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. A highly concept-driven work of mutual repulsion and antagonism as much as attraction, “Before After”featured the two excellent dancers, who both went topless toward the end. An act like this tends to go against the grain of American dance, which doctrinally would usually prefer that things like this be illustrated only kinetically. In “Before After,” rather, the act announced that the dancers had stripped themselves of all psychic defenses.

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was up next and performed excerpts from Mr. Jones’s “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”Mr. Jones’s works describe an American landscape but juggle global theatrical techniques, confronting audiences with an indictment of our shared sexual, religious, and political hypocrisy. “Last Supper” was a hurdy-gurdy, performed with a traveling medicine show’s brash assurance.

At first, the dancers stood arrayed at the foot of the stage before a black curtain, while Mr. Jones called out numbers football-play style. Then, the performers ran up the aisle, the curtain rose, and we saw the bare walls of the City Center stage, on which African throne-style chairs were arrayed. Mr. Jones intoned American catch phases, but gave them a spooneristic scramble, such as “Last, at free,” and a depiction of flagellation, perhaps inspired by last week’s debates on Capitol Hill, furthered the political motif.

Trisha Brown’s “Set and Reset,” which opened the second half of the program, made me question whether the label “dated” has any meaning as a term of criticism or even as an adjective. Every piece of dance — be it “Sleeping Beauty” or yesterday’s New Wave, bears the imprint of the time in which it was composed. “Set and Reset”was choreographed in 1983 but it is redolent of the 1960s downtown dance Zeitgeist in which Ms. Brown participated. Ms. Brown has continued to rework the ideas she originally championed, and according to one’s own bias, she deserves either praise for her integrity or criticism of her stagnation. I steered clear of an ideological reaction: If nothing else, “Set and Reset” registers as a magnum opus, showing Ms.

Brown’s work at its best.

Like “Before After,””Set and Reset” is performed to spoken repetition — we hear “Long time, no see” over and over again — that evolves into vocalizing, while the soundtrack is overlaid with hammering brass that gradually coheres into a rhythmic pattern. There are filmy costumes and a setting of inflatable objects by Robert Rauschenberg on which are projected archaic newsreels.The dancers jog, swing their arms loosely, stretch, dip, and ripple in a casual, throwaway movement meter. Most of the time, each one does his or her own thing, but sometimes they fall into happenstance, quick-dissolving confluences and encounters. The exposed wings of the theater both blur the performers’ transition from personal “reality” into theatrical artifice and make such distortion an integral part of the performance.As the title indicates, “Set and Reset,” is constructed along cyclical repetition without obvious hills and valleys. The newsreels underscore specificity of place and time, while the movement seems oblivious and free-floating.

The Pennsylvania Ballet closed the program, performing excerpts from Matthew Neenan’s “11:11,” choreographed to the zany ramblings of Rufus Wainwright. Like the piece performed by the Dutch National Ballet, “11:11” could have been done by a modern dance company; it didn’t particularly call upon the skills and articulation of trained classical ballet dancers. The overall movement flavor is ballet vocabulary, but it’s given a hard-hitting aeroberocized accent. Relations between the sexes were subversive and antiromantic. To the opening song, “Vibrate,” four couples are prone in the shadows upstage, while a downstage lead couple’s interactions concluded when the man threw the woman into the wings, then walked across the stage and exited.

The dance movement was interspersed with anecdotal episodes that commented on the lyric’s off-center musings. In “Oh What a World,” Mr. Wainwright evinces mock amazement at “men reading fashion magazines,” to which Mr. Neenan responds by bringing forth a metrosexual duet. The quirkiness of Mr. Wainwright’s lyrics matched by some originality of sensibility on the part of Mr. Neenan made “11:11″diverting. This marked the Philadelphia Ballet’s first appearance in New York in many years, and the dancers worked diligently and successfully at reintroducing the company to New York.

“Fall for Dance” until October 8 (130 W. 55th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-581-1212)


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