As its title hints, the Fall for Dance Festival intends to engender excitement about dance across a spectrum of techniques and periods. It aims to yank the audience by the collars of their souls onto the stage. On October 3, 2009 the performers at New York City Center accomplished this to various degrees. Some tugged, some seized the viewers.
If they did not overwhelm the crowd, the first three pieces, Fokine’s Le Spectre de la Rose and Dying Swan and Sang Jijia’s Snow, did show off talent and tension.
Spectre not only highlighted the control and strength of the male dancer, but also reminded the audience of Spectre’s role in the history of ballet – it was among the first to feature the male dancer as the centerpiece. Yet Spectre also moved forward the art with another unusual trait – it placed the female character in the position of power as the dreamer, and the male as the object of the dream. The dancer Saturday night was romantic as a rose, but seemed to flow through the movements with too sweet and innocent a posture, even, and perhaps especially, for the dream of a young woman back from her first ball.
An extremely brief performance, Dying Swan pairs well opposite Spectre as an example of agonizing death expressed in ballet with as much elegance as youthful romance. The solo was performed poignantly with the broken, harsh movements of arms as wings above the small, controlled movement of the legs. As a swan nestling to sleep, the ballerina’s positioning of her body so recalled the image in nature that the movement spoke as clearly as the title.
Snow, the other solo, approached the stage with a much grander use of space, time, and movement. A more modern piece, Snow sets the dance on a large, empty black stage with artificial snow falling from beginning to end, accompanied by fairly repetitive music. Jijia wore simple, all black clothing and utilized the entire stage, including back corners quite invisible to some students on the far left and right of the theater. His movements were often circular, sweeping, and abruptly broken, and built to frantic tension as the snow began to fall more heavily. His control of himself, and his ability to move limbs as though he wished they wouldn’t, seemed to give a plausible view of some universal human struggle. The lack of landmarks of forward movement may have detracted from Snow’s ability to connect with the audience, but the dance still pried a few jaws gently open in wonder as it concluded, the only sound left the snow falling on the stage.
The titan of the evening, Alvin Ailey’s classic Revelations took stage last. It ground out all the man and music power necessary to trip the audience into pure awe at dance. A staple of the company’s work for about four decades, Revelations still translates with fresh potency on stage. Its many dancers do not neglect it with the disrespect sometimes rusted onto repeated classics. Its movements, sounds, colors, meanings transcend time and race at the same time that they address them quite specifically. Parts of “Wade in the Water” and earlier, “I’ve Been Buked” seem to echo the wing-like stretching and faltering of Dying Swan, but rise with the burden of slavery, and of all mankind, weighting the arms, such that the audience cannot help wonder at such strength. The duet in “Fix Me Jesus” has less romance but vastly more trust than Spectre’s pair. The pastor’s heavenward raising of his partner, and their mutual control and balance, touches the viewer with more force than the leap of impersonal idealized love in Spectre. The jumps and crouches and broken sweeps of the trio of men in “Sinner Man” also reflect some movements of Snow, but in their couple minutes on stage bring more frustration and struggle than all the chaos Jijia leaves in the snow.
By the end of the night, the audience’s soul had certainly fallen for dance, crashed again and again with the rhythm of “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.”
