Fall for Dance Festival

I was thrilled to accompany a friend last night to the Fall for Dance Festival at City Center.  This is the 10 year anniversary of the festival, and last night's performances were absolutely brilliant.  A few months back one of my colleagues mentioned that the festival is the hottest deal in town if you are interested in seeing works by some of the best dance companies in the world.  And she was so right.  Tickets cost $15 (plus processing fees), but you have to buy them as soon as they go on sale, because they are not available for very long.  I missed the ticket sale frenzy, but I was lucky enough to have a friend with an extra ticket, and I jumped (well, maybe I didn't jump, but it was certainly more than a relevé) at the chance to join her.  

There were four performances.  The show opened with SOUNDspace, a work by Dorrance Dance, a new and highly acclaimed company of tap dancers.  This performance was music in the form of dance, if you can imagine.  Their combination of dance with a rhythmic, at times syncopated, sound resembles Savion Glover's style.  I found a video with excerpts from earlier performances.  But the videos don't do them justice.  This group really brought the house down (with 'da funk and 'da noise).  They were absolutely amazing and their performance received a standing ovation. 

The second work by Doug Elkins Choreography, Etc playfully incorporated music by James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Amy Winehouse, cleverly using the lyrics to underscore the storyline portrayed by the 2 couples on stage -- a storyline that harked back to Shakespeare's Othello.  This was a moving and simultaneously unsettling performance.  In the third piece, by The Royal Ballet, the two dancers were joined on the stage by a pianist and cellist.  This performance was grace, strength, and masterful technique incarnate.

But the most anticipated performance of the night was arguably The Rite of Spring, by the Martha Graham Dance Company, since this piece is celebrating its return to the stage after a 20 year hiatus.  I loved this performance, whereas my friend was not so impressed.  I see her point.  The work is modern and a bit grandiose, but this is the company's style -- they have a strong aesthetic and a unique manner of dancing.  Perhaps a NY Times review of the 1984 production put it best, "it is a work of disturbing and modern urban tension."  The musical score, written 100 years ago by Igor Stravinsky, provides a lot of this tension.  Together with the spartan set, the dramatic music, and the exaggerated choreography, it was all very cerebral and it reminded me of a time when there was a great deal of focus on the workings of the unconscious psyche.  Themes of aggression, power, fate, the unpredictable nature of life, personal vulnerability, individual sacrifice, and the role of society were all on display in the most theatrical of ways, exposed perhaps by the stark nature of the performance itself. It was, in a word, impressive.