The Arts in New York City

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.”

My first encounter with the annual Fall for Dance festival was surprisingly pleasurable, to say the least. The performance was put together by twenty dance companies and consisted of four performing groups.

The first piece was an Australian ballet called “Le Spectre de la rose.” Initially performed in 1911, the piece depicted a girl dancing with a “spirit of the rose” in her dream. The costumes demanded more of my attention than the movements; the girl was wearing a gorgeous, poufy dress and the male spirit was wearing a tight, rose-like outfit. Although the girl’s dress was pretty, it hid much of her feet and consequently made her look as if she was barely dancing. The spirit’s wide leaps and turns complimented his bright clothes. Collectively, the couple managed to reveal the story line; the girl was in a flowing, dream-like state and the spirit took charge of her dream.

The second dance, called “Snow,” premiered in Taiwan during 2007. During Sang Jijia’s performance, I discovered that the curators of the festival had not bothered to make sure that the entire stage was visible from all parts of the auditorium. I was sitting on the far right, and I was therefore only able to view half of the performance. Occasionally, I was able to see parts of Jijia’s flailing arms and legs, but not his entire body. The half that I managed to glimpse was barely impressive; although powerful at first, both the falling and the background music grew repetitious and mundane.

As much as I disliked “Snow,” “The Dying Swan” made up for it twenty times over. Originally danced in St. Petersburg in 1907, this Russian ballet planted a new, deep respect for classical dance inside of me. Firstly, there were actual musicians on stage with Diana Vishneva, the ballerina.  These musicians played beautifully, complimenting the dancer’s movements with their expressions. Vishneva wore a gorgeous dress, which, unlike the dress in “Le Spectre de la Rose,” actually showed off her feet. She stayed on her toes for the entire performance, creating tiny and truly swan-like movements.

Alvin Ailey, the main performing group, rounded off the festival with an unforgettable line-up. Originally performed in NYC during 1960, “Revelations” was split into three sections: “Pilgrim of Sorrow,” “Take Me To The Water,” and “Move, Members, Move”. The last section was best engraved into my memory; the women wore cheerful, old-fashioned, yellow dresses and the men wore old-fashioned suits. The women used chairs as an aid throughout the performance, which added symmetry to their already dazzling, organized appearance. Together, they clapped, waved, and spun with unheard-of vigor. If that wasn’t enough, they tricked their audience at the end of their performance, repeating their last song. They made the crowd part of their show and, consequently, received a much-deserved standing ovation.

The four performing groups were drastically different, and I enjoyed the chance to view such variety in a short amount of time. The sequence of performances was well planned, and, aside from the technical carelessness displayed during “Snow,” it was a fabulous introduction to dance. I strongly recommend the festival to my fellow dance novices.