For the commissioned premiere that the Australian theater collective Pony Cam presented during the Fall for Dance Festival at New York City Center this weekend, the group researched the more than 450 pieces that had been staged across the 22 previous editions of the festival and crammed bits of all of them into 35 minutes of comedic dance theater. Introducing this conceit on Friday, one of Pony Cam’s five members also noted that they had read all the reviews of the festival in The New York Times. This got a laugh.
“That was a knowing laugh,” the actor quipped.
A populist showcase of miscellaneous programs, erratic taste and indiscriminately enthusiastic audiences, Fall for Dance has always been challenging to review. The problem resembles the one that Pony Cam set itself. How much precious space to allot to each dance? How to find cumulative coherence and meaning where none are intended? How to be comprehensive without sounding cursory and cranky? Here we go again (only covering the final three of five programs).
Pony Cam’s show, titled “kinda like that,” was an entertaining, A-for-effort stunt. The group promised to reveal patterns in the festival archive, but all its outsider eyes discovered was a prevalence of solos, duets and bare-chested dancers. Inadvertently, the work demonstrated that watching people pretend to juggle is funnier than watching people pretend to dance. Still, “kinda like that” was a fairly accurate representation of the festival’s jumble and an act of anti-pretentious generosity, accommodating Fall for Dance newbies by identifying some choreographic allusions (by voice and supertitle) while flattering connoisseurs by leaving others unlabeled.
Was it a coincidence that the shirtlessness and the recycling of Bach that Pony Cam parodied were both present in the offering, at the opposite end of Program 5, of the Australian Ballet? That performance, the U.S. premiere of “Seven Days” by Stephanie Lake, was an equal-effort antithesis of Pony Cam’s piece. It was an expertly danced display of pretentiousness and labored eccentricity. The selection that came in between — Miami City Ballet performing “Roses from the South,” its new Alexei Ratmansky work to Strauss waltzes — was in the middle aesthetically, too: a raggedly danced rendition of a ballet enjoyably balanced on the edge of self-parody.
Pony Cam verbally identified how dance feeds on its own history. Program 4 had examples. San Francisco Ballet brought “Faun,” a 2009 duet by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui set to Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun.” Unlike Vaslav Nijinsky’s boldly two-dimensional 1912 ballet to that music or Jerome Robbins’s brilliant 1953 transposition to a ballet studio, Cherkaoui’s version is all melted joints, drained of erotic tension.
In “Echo: Sog,” a world premiere, the gorgeous Stuttgart Ballet veteran Friedemann Vogel (with choreographic assistance by Thomas Lempertz) danced to a piano version of the chaconne from Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2. In dance history, that music is associated with José Limón and Bill T. Jones, but “Echo: Sog” reminded me of “A Suite of Dances,” a virtuoso-acts-casual solo set to Bach cello suites that Robbins made for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1994. The comparison wasn’t flattering.
Also on Program 4 was Gauthier Dance, also from Stuttgart, which gave the U.S. premiere of its new Hofesh Shechter work, “Any way the wind blows.” It can seem as if all contemporary repertory troupes have a Shechter work like this: a neo-primitivist ritual transplanting Jewish folk dance into the club, with an on-and-on episodic structure segmented by dramatic shifts in lighting and in music Shechter tailors himself. “Any way the wind blows” is one of the better versions, and the Gauthier dancers embody Shechter’s style better than most companies.
Fall for Dance has an admirable tradition, with hit-or-miss results, of introducing new voices from abroad. Program 3 had a good example in Lior Tavori Dance Company, from Israel. For “Crust,” the stage was set with a Persian carpet, where the dancers executed a long and eccentric choreographic phrase in overlapping canon formation while a voice-over asserted, “You were born, and so you’re free.”
The eccentricity was earthy, sharing some family relation with Shechter and the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin (who got the longest quotation in Pony Cam’s piece). In contrast with “Seven Days,” the screaming here (a birdlike cawing) was convincingly surreal, and the work had a meaningful structure, falling apart the more it repeated and the more the dancers interacted.
At the end, “Crust” alluded on its soundtrack, over the melody of “Silent Night,” to the societal upheaval of the American civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Surely, this was a displacement of more local and recent conflagrations. The program featuring this Israeli company was the only one for which audience members were required to enter through metal detectors. After “Crust,” I looked up at the motto over City Center’s stage: “Es Selam Aleikum,” or “Peace be upon you” in Arabic.
The rest of Program 3 was an object lesson in the perils of virtuosity. The Royal Ballet’s “Paganini — The First Virtuoso” went in for all the emptiness of wizardly skill, from perfunctory choreography (by Loughlan Prior) to overproduction (a piano spewing fog). Steven McRae’s brittle, ungrounded footwork in tap shoes was more of an offense to the art of tap than Pony Cam’s forthrightly amateur tapping.
The Spanish dancer Juan Tomás de la Molía brought back the solo he performed earlier this year at City Center during its Flamenco Festival. The blossoming talent was still apparent, but his spontaneous-seeming antics had hardened into shtick. He looked too much like a performer who has read some glowing notices.
This Fall for Dance, I was most moved by the end of Pony Cam’s piece. Finding no footage of Eiko and Koma’s “Snow” (1999), the group recited, as fake snow fell, beautiful paragraphs of description in a Times review by Jack Anderson.
Those paragraphs were a memento of the historical importance of dance reviews, an increasingly endangered species. Thank you, Pony Cam, for the reminder.
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