Cheap and Cheerful, Fall for Dance Wows the Crowd

Let’s face it: The annual Fall for Dance phenomenon—six separate programs at the City Center over 10 days—isn’t aimed at critics. Just about everything about it is geared to be popular, and why not? That’s what City Center was intended for when the city took it over in lieu of unpaid taxes in 1943. Affordable art for everyone—that was the mandate for both New York City Ballet and New York City Opera in their early, City Center days. In 1948, when people like me started going to see Balanchine, tickets in the top balcony cost $1.20 (at intermission we sneaked down to the almost empty orchestra).

Five years ago, Fall for Dance became instantly famous for charging only $10 a seat, and every year lines form around the block the day tickets go on sale. As a result, there’s no happier audience, no matter what’s on the bill. Throw in diversity to the max—there’s something for everybody on every program—and you have a recipe not only for universal satisfaction but for universal self-congratulation: Look! We got in! What a bargain!

And so we love the Thai, the Hawaiian, the Indian, the Hispanic, the Chinese, the jazzy, the tappy, the hip-hoppy, the cute, the campy, the portentous, the Expressionist. We love the rigorous Merce Cunningham Sounddance, the joyous Paul Taylor Esplanade, Jerome Robbins’ romantic In the Night, the smooth  ethno-jazz of Garth Fagan’s  From Before, the snippets of classical ballet, the self-expressive/self-indulgent solos. And we’re going to reward them all with indiscriminate enthusiasm: Put it on the stage and we’ll holler and cheer and stomp.

It’s a great accomplishment to bring so many enthusiastic people into the theater for dance, and it’s a blessing to expose so many different talents to the New York audience—including us critics, for whom there are always revelations or at least surprises. Who knew, for instance, that the Pichet Klunchun Dance Company, from Thailand, would provide us with such beautiful images of serene, measured movement, the performers accoutered in exquisite gold and bejeweled brocade costumes and headdresses? Or that the National Ballet of Canada had such an impressive phalanx of disciplined, virile men. (They were the soldiers in Jiří Kylián’s inflated antiwar Soldiers’ Mass.)

But not one of the six programs was of consistent quality or interest, and all too many of the 28 items on display were either of no consequence, poorly performed or offensive. Perhaps worst in show were the Lombard twins from Argentina, gyrating to the music of Piazzolla. (That great 1985 show Tango Argentina has a lot to answer for.) The twins were stripped to the waist, tossing their long ponytails, strutting and waggling in perfect vulgar harmony. Watching twins do synchronized dancing is amusing for about 20 seconds, and then it becomes as boring as synchronized swimming. The dreadfulness was compounded by the curtain calls, as the brothers kept hugging each  on the stage in ecstasies of self-congratulation. The audience loved them.

Equally pleased with herself was Talia Paz in a seemingly endless excerpt from a solo work called Love. It was made for Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, and I’m told that sometimes she carries on for as long as an hour. Not that Paz is without ability, but this piece—set to a particularly jejune song played on a relentless loop—is pure exhibitionism: Oh, how she feels, how she suffers, how she endures! The audience loved her.

Let’s pass over the ludicrously overrated Shen Wei, the uninteresting, generic Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal, the BeijingDance (excerpts from something called The Cold Dagger). Let’s quietly regret the drab, juiceless performance of ABT’s ill-matched Xiomara Reyes and Gennadi Saveliev in a duet plucked from Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading and a sweetly pretty rendition of Balanchine’s virtuoso Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux by the Houston Ballet and the boredom of the (dozen or so, portly) Gentlemen of Hälau Nä Kamalei swaying in place throughout a repetitive, static number called Kahikilani while a musician intoned an incomprehensible narrative and banged on a gourd. (The program notes reveal that this is the “love story of a surfer from Kauai who comes to the North Shore of Oahu to ride the waves of Sunset Beach.”)

Let’s celebrate instead the real achievements.

For the first time in 40 years, New Yorkers could experience a Balanchine ballet called Pithoprakta, re-created (and partly re-imagined) by Suzanne Farrell, on whom it was made back in 1968. The music, by Iannis Xenakis, is hardly of consequence, but the piece itself—in the direct line of Balanchine’s groundbreaking works which leads from Agon and Episodes to Symphony in Three Movements and Kammermusik No. 2—is riveting: more challenging, more “modern,” than just about anything anyone has made since. You can see the Farrell outline in every movement and pose the ballerina presents, and if Elisabeth Holowchuk is no Farrell—far from it—you could see through her to infer Balanchine’s intentions. Matthew Prescott, in the Arthur Mitchell role, was handicapped by the fact that neither Farrell nor Mitchell could remember the details of his role. The corps managed to convey a convincing jagged, ominous intensity. Thank you, Fall for Dance, for making Pithoprakta available to us again. Too bad you chose to present it only once, rather than the two performances  granted to a number of far less significant works.

Also, hurrah for the very polished and appealing Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, who brought a beautiful and almost never seen Twyla Tharp piece called Sweet Fields that harks back to the serious modern dance of such choreographers as Doris Humphrey. Set to a group of deeply moving 18th-century hymns by William Billings and others, Sweet Fields shows Tharp working with apparent simplicity in a reverent but un-solemn mode. Apparently drawing on her own Quaker roots, she presents five men and five women, in Norma Kamali white, celebrating their calm yet fervent faith. There’s no element of pastiche or exploitation here, and a considerable measure of invention far removed from what we think of as typical Tharpian punchiness. Sweet Fields reveals an unsuspected and convincing spiritual dimension to Tharp’s imagination. It’s a major work that we would have been seeing regularly if—like Paul Taylor and Mark Morris—Tharp had her own company instead of being dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Let’s salute also Louise Lecavalier, from Quebec, whose galvanizing dancing overcame the irritating effect of the “concept” of Lone Epic (empty music stands facing an invisible conductor, cue cards spelling out “What does she really, really want?”); the profound Indian dancer Madhavi Mudgal’s invocation to Siva; and the striking duet from Christopher Wheeldon’s Rush, performed superbly by the Oregon Ballet Theatre. You’re grateful for this excerpt, yet cranky, too, because you’re left frustrated, wanting to see the entire ballet. It’s Wheeldon  interruptus.

It was good to see work by up-and-coming choreographers like Kate Weare and Richard Siegel. And very good to see the exquisite Fang-Yi Sheu, who for several years almost single-handedly restored the Martha Graham repertory to greatness. Now she’s with something called LAFA & Artists Dance Company, and she performed a duet with a table, mostly in silhouette. Even so, she was breathtakingly lovely.

Fall for Dance has become an essential piece of punctuation in the New York dance season, lavishly ushering in the packed few months before Nutcracker and Ailey claim the town. It’s like plunging into a cold lake after the torpor of the summer—a salutary wake-up call. But precisely because it’s so stimulating and so popular, we can’t help wishing it was a little more discriminating. The public is going to embrace whatever it does, and we critics deserve a break.

rgottlieb@observer.com