Who's falling for dance?

I attended two dance shows yesterday: Fridays@Noon at 92nd Street Y and New York City Center's Fall for Dance. I haven't been to Fridays@Noon in a long while, largely due to time and energy factors, but I'm glad I found my way to this one. Over the years, I have never taken in too many of the extremely popular Fall for Dance shows either, and that's because I've already fallen and I can't get up.

Who's falling for dance? And who's spending lunch break catching some dance on the Upper East Side?

It was a small, mainly "insider" dance audience at 92Y yesterday afternoon for Words and Images: Trebien Pollard, A Future Vision. Pretty much everyone voiced some version of these words: "I wish more people could have seen this program." Well, actually more people can, since 92Y has a recorded livestream, thanks to Paul Galando and his dance and new media fellows from NYU Tisch. So you don't have to take it from me, but curator Pollard and his colleagues Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Aimee Rials and Brother(hood) Dance! (Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine) killed it.

Pollard's dance artists step up and acknowledge that dance, while maintaining rigorous craft, can make powerful contributions to the current discourse on race, gender, sexuality and justice. I greatly admire Hunter and Valentine's work. In the video and dance excerpt they showed from Black Jones, they continue to set a high bar for exploring facets of Black gay identity and threats to Black life and well-being. They get me with accomplished performance technique as well as with humor and tenderness. Pollard, draped in a long, black gown, approaches his solo, Never Not Broken, like a ritual priest. Inspired by Martin Buber's I and Thou and Claudia Rankine's Citizen, the work makes use of Rankine's text and stark, solemn imagery to establish a space where hard questions can be asked about the cost of living as one's true self in oppressive society.

Mercer and Rials were discoveries for me. The only white and only female artist on the program, Rials is a New York-based Tisch grad raised in Alabama. Her solo, Modif(her), draws from her sense of crossing strict borders whenever she goes home, adjusting her appearance to conform, not out of shame but out of genuine concern for her and her family's safety. Modif(her) crackles with tension, obsessiveness and watchfulness, all sharply contained and restrained in space. Mercer's performance (with "drifter and assistant" Johnny Chatman II) impressed me for the opposite reason: Despite also alluding to societal strictures and dangers, Mercer seemed voracious in his imaginative reach and energy.

For a schedule of upcoming Fridays@Noon events, click here.

The Friday night Fall for Dance show featured France's CCN de la Rochelle/Cie Accrorap (acrobatic hip hop), Australia's Bangarra Dance Theatre and Hong Kong Ballet, all bringing big, crowd-pleasing US premieres. Oh...and among those unfurling ensembles, one more act, a solo: New York's Ayodele Casel, holding down the City Center stage with her assertive and nimble tap style. ("I feel like Ray Barreto on the timbales!") But maybe I should look at this a different way, because no tap dancer ever dances alone. Casel may have appeared to be up there by herself, but she showed up with her tribe--the ancestral women tap dancers, like Jeni Le Gon and Marion Coles, who she honors in While I Have the Floor. Every other act on Friday's program sprawled out in time, maybe too much so. (Dance sampler programs aimed at new audiences should give us samples, not productions almost lengthy enough to serve as their own evening.) But, if I had my wish, it would be for more Casel and a broader sample of her musical powers. It has been a long time since I've seen her dance, and While I Have the Floor, with its outward focus on others and heritage, though admirable, was not satisfying.

Fall for Dance's affordability is a great deal for dance artists and dance fans on a budget. Its omnibus programming enables established dance fans to easily try out companies or genres of dance they've never before considered or to catch up with a production they might have missed. I hope it really does inspire folks to explore and support other shows. For the hardcore dance-goer, though--okay, for me, I will own it--the evening can seem long while devoid of meaningful context for each company's presentation. It feels like both too much and not enough. But here's one sure thing: The folks in the seats throw a lot of love back at that stage.

This Fall for Dance program continues tonight at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here. For information and tickets for programs running October 5-8, click here.

New York City Center
131 W 55th St (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan
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Dance at the Delacorte!

Fall for Dance Festival Celebrates 10th Anniversary With Performances at the Delacorte Theater
by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, May 9, 2013

Falling for dance again....

For many of us, it takes very little to fall for concert dance. In fact, we've been goners for some time now. For everyone else--and, in America, that's a sizable number--the kind of rah-rah action on hand at New York City Center's annual Fall for Dance festival might be just the ticket. And a relatively cheap ticket at that ($15), if they can manage to get their hands on one, even with the newly-expanded--12 nights now!--Fall for Dance evenings. Really, all you sharpies who already love dance should step aside, at least for one year, and let some newbies get in the door.

Once in the door, they will discover a tossed salad of troupes and styles--everything from ballet to hula to contemporary dance out of Indonesia--designed to open their eyes to dance's fabulous diversity, its connection to their values, and the rock-star appeal of skilled, hard-working performers from celebrated troupes. They will thrill to an environment where they're free to applaud between sections of a dance and raise the roof with lusty, arena-ready cheering when it's all over. A fun night out, maybe even an enlightening one. That can be good for business at City Center and, ideally, elsewhere.

Wendy Whelan and Tyler Angle (Photo © 2011 Erin Baiano)

Jared Grimes (Photo by Ernest Gregory)

For the most part, I had a good time with Program A, which featured choreography by Jared Grimes (Transformation in Tap); Christopher Wheeldon (Fang-Yi Sheu & Artists in Five Movements, Three Repeats); Sol León and Paul Lightfoot (Nederlands Dans Theater in Shutters Shut); and Jarek Cemerek (BalletBoyz in Void).

In Grimes' voice-over, he remembered himself, newly arrived in New York, as "a mad scientist" in the lab of the tap world. His world-premiered ensemble piece, Transformation in Tap, isn't nearly as "mad" as it might be--especially since one of the most delectable parts of it, a Grimes solo to "The Lady is A Tramp," reaches way back to pay homage to world-class, charismatic Sammy Davis, Jr. But younger viewers will find in Grimes' intense, muscular style some of the clean snap and acrobatic flourish of hip hop, keeping tap in the moment and ready for whatever's ahead.

To my eye, Wheeldon gave modern dancer Fang-Yi Sheu an elegant, lyrical backdrop--New York City Ballet dancers Tyler Angle, Craig Hall and Wendy Whelan. She is, to quote a superstar of baseball, "the straw that stirs the drink" in Five Movements, Three Repeats (2012), a being of almost inhuman ability to mold and re-mold her body, shape-shifting into new forms. Whelan and Angle--faithful, if less dazzling, in a somber, increasingly ethereal pas de deux--have the good fortune to have been paired not only with each other but with composer Max Richter's affecting remix of Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth." (Listen to it here). What good is love.... What good am I.... But while a voice within me cries/I'm sure someone may answer my call...." It was hard to not feel a pang, even a foreboding chill, whenever Angle lifted Whelan just high enough for her toes to clear and skim the floor, just high enough to free her of the earth for a brief respite.

Shutters Shut (2003) is a sparkling duet performed by NDT's Astrid Boons and Quentin Roger with Gertrude Stein's "If I told him: A completed portrait of Picasso" as score. Clad in costumes that seem to flash a succession of now white, now black signals--a secret language--these two jutting, wind-up dolls rapidly work through Stein's ear-tickling repetitions and variations.

In Void (2011), Britain's hunky BalletBoyz kick butt and will smack down anyone who hears "Dance is..." and thinks "...for sissies." I was reminded less of West Side Story (see the Macaulay review) than Fight Club, right down to the suggestion of a secluded, urban warehouse setting where bare-chested guys get into it, but a Fight Club choreographed to be sleek, slick and picturesque, where no blow lands with impact and people fly at one another but all you get is the idea of men fighting, over and over and over and over.... Cemerek carefully crafted every detail of this idea but quickly exhausts it, even if he never exhausts those ten amazing dancers.

Fall for Dance continues through October 13. If any tickets remain, you can find out here or by calling the City Center box office at 212-581-1212 (Monday-Saturday, Noon-8pm; Sunday, Noon-7:30pm).

New York City Center
55th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Yummy baked goods at Fall for Dance

Mmmm... Some scrumptious doings at last night's Fall for Dance dance-sampler festival at City Center from Ayman Harper and Mario Zambrano of Richard Siegal/The Bakery in Siegal's The New 45, a duet premiered in 2006. It was like watching some of those Tharp-heyday performances from Sara Rudner, Shelley Washington, Rose Marie Wright...and then some. Loose, fluid, spritely physical with impulses that come from everywhere and from out of nowhere, zippy timing, an outpouring of invention and easygoing humor, and that impudent way of snuggling up to jazz and calypso. The audience roared.

Siegal will perform his solo, As If Stranger--which won Siegal and his collaborators a 2008 Bessie Award for visual design--for the opening ceremonies of EMPAC, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy, New York, October 9-10). I missed As If Stranger when it ran at Danspace Project this past season. After savoring The New 45, I intend to run to the next show Siegal brings to New York City.

Free moves for all

Free dance lessons continue at City Center's bustling Fall for Dance Festival Lounge (55th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues) at 6:30pm prior to the evening's 8pm Fall for Dance show. These informal sessions are open to the public as well as to festival ticketholders.

On Thursday, September 25, try hip hop moves with Tammy Colucci. Or just kick back with some refreshments and conversation.

Here are some photos from last night's hula lesson with Luana Haraguchi and members of Halau Hula O Na Mele 'Aina O Hawai'i. Click any photo to see a larger image. All photos (c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa.

And I can't get up!

Here's a piece by my friend and colleague Tobi Tobias on the phenomenon that is Fall for Dance.

Where Fans Are Encouraged to Dance With the Dancers

Where Fans Are Encouraged to Dance With the Dancers
by Julie Bloom

Published: October 3, 2007, The New York Times

Dancers, choreographers, audience members and passers-by mingle and commune each night of the 10-performance Fall for Dance festival at City Center.