On the morning of September 12, I stocked up on juice, water, and snacks and sat in front of my computer battling it out with other rabid dance fans for the best seats to City Center’s annual Fall for Dance festival. I should have brought more provisions—I was out of orange juice long before I had tickets in hand. Tickets went on sale at 11 a.m., and at 11:02, I was number 1181 in line. The allure of $10 tickets to performances by world class companies is enough to keep New York’s passionate dance community clicking refresh: when I finally got tickets around 1 p.m., the theater was almost completely sold out. I was worried that from my seats in the gallery, the dancers would look like pirouetting ants. Luckily, despite my vertigo-inducing seats, the performances lived up to the frenzied hype.
The program opened with the New York premiere of Merce Cunningham’s XOVER, featuring sets by Robert Rauschenberg and a score by John Cage. Cage’s schizophrenic score was the perfect backdrop to Cunningham’s fragmented choreographic motifs. One compelling theme was Cunningham’s investigation of the relationships between the dancers onstage. A series of tombes took dancers in different directions, as if methodically looking for something. At times, penchee arabesques became antennas, with limbs searching for signals to cut through Cage’s blaring static.
The dancers, unassumingly clothed in plain white unitards, were at their best when the dancing was able to speak for itself: I loved the beautiful, languid weight shares in which the female dancer executed a perfectly coiled attitude while the male dancer luxuriated in a deep backbend. Throughout the piece, Cunningham played with dynamics, sending one pair upstage performing a lightning-fast pas de deux while another performed it slowly downstage. It was a pleasure to see the company, featuring the last dancers trained by Cunningham himself, before it disbands at the end of 2011.
The highlight of the show was Gallim Dance’s raucous performance of I Can See Myself in Your Pupil, choreographed by company director Andrea Miller. The highly theatrical piece opened with dancers convulsing in seizure-like spasms. As the dancers gyrated, their numbers multiplied as they were accompanied by grandiose silhouettes illuminated on the scrim. Miller’s choreography destabilized the distinction between playfulness and aggression as dancers shoved, spanked, and pecked each other and grappled in capoeria-inspired sequences. The dynamics of power and play were friendly and ferocious, such as when a dancer performed grand jetes with one leg pinned to a partner’s chest.
The dancers’ delightfully garish fluorescent costumes paralleled the exciting, almost-grotesque contortions the performers executed: the movements, like the costumes, were incredible, but eerie. In one instance, a performer decked out in a neon green ensemble squatted and hopped around the stage on the insides of her feet, a stunt that made me wince in sympathy. Challenging physical feats elicited incredulous exclamations from the audience, such as when two male dancers spun a female performer as though she was a Twister dial. Some choreographic sequences exaggerated classical ballet ideals: hyper-pliable feet and deep plies cleverly inverted balletic grace to the point where it bordered on freak-show. Like ringleaders calling out to spectators, the dancers engaged the audience, offering triumphant “ta-da!” gestures that playfully acknowledged their own delight in their movement.
The motifs fused various movement vocabularies such as ballet, modern, hip-hop, Afro-Caribbean, and vernacular dance, and each dancer embellished the movement with his or her own personal style. Some flung their bodies with wild, ecstatic abandon, while others carefully placed their furled fingers and clenched shoulders. Despite the disparate influences and interpretations, the dancers pulsated as one coherent unit.
Unison was also on display in the lovely performance of Vistaar, choreographed by Madhavi Mudgal. This performance featured the vocabulary of Odissi movement, a traditional form of Indian dance. Accompanied by live musicians seated on the stage, the dancers moved as one, and in such harmony with the music that it seemed as though the steps were extensions of the music itself. The dancers’ costumes, adorned with metal cymbals, also contributed to the soundtrack, further strengthening the relationship between movement and music. Like the Gallim company, these dancers performed fast-paced movements, but unlike the spastic contortions in the previous performance, Mudgal’s dancers executed wrist and feet articulations with calm control.
The final performance, Miami City Ballet’s rendition of Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section, was as exhausting to watch as it must have been to perform. The dancers’ remarkable athleticism, on display in dizzying corkscrew turns and explosive jumps, was never allowed to either wane or reach a crescendo. Eighties-inspired costumes, including mustard-yellow velour tanks, tube socks, and sweat bands, and jazzercise steps, such as boxing and running in place—creative when the piece premiered in 1983—now felt kitschy, rather than clever. As promised in the program, the dancers did “sail, soar, and tear through the air,” but the audience wasn’t able to keep up with their frenetic pace. The dancers weren’t able to breathe life and personality into Tharp’s demanding movement. At times, the performance felt more like watching a superb technique class than a polished performance: the dancers were all technically gifted, but weren’t able to dance big enough to reach all the way to the back of the theater, where, it turns out, I was happy to sit.
