FALL FOR DANCE: PROGRAM 1

Review by Celia Ipiotis

Happy crowds gathered in front of City Center for the opening of the 2024 Fall For Dance Festival. Typical of Fall for Dance programming, the evening featured an eclectic mix of pieces criss-crossing from ballet to contemporary ballet and Gaga.

Welcoming the crowd, the lovely Wendy Whelan, Associate Artistic Director of NYCB noted all three choreographers featured in the opening program shared a relationship with NYCB: Alexei Ratmansky, Tiler Peck and Andrea Miller. 

The evening opened on a reminder that all is not peaceful in the world. Born in Russia and raised in the Ukraine, NYCB Artist-in-Residence, Alexei Ratmansky expressed his fraught emotions in the premiere of Wartime Elegy performed by the National Ballet of Ukraine to music by Valentyn Silvestrov mixed with lively Ukrainian Village Music.

As if draped in a veil of sadness, women in long arabesque extensions fall into men’s arms.  The geometric symmetry of bodies rising and falling adds to the sensation of a community aiming for hope. This elegiac opening flows into a folk dance frolic where the women flirt, shake their heads side to side and the men pop up beside them clasping hands and twisting side to side. A rich vein of optimism, Ukrainian folk dance offers a communal choreography that has enriched ballet throughout the ages.

Blessed with an unendingly inventive movement vocabulary, the ballet is more streamlined, more direct in it’s references to a land shrouded in loss but tied forever to a bountiful culture.

An ABT Principal dancer of impressive versatility, Aron Bell performed a solo choreographed by Tiler Peck to a two-piano score by  the experimental composer and performance artist, Meredith Monk. Standing next to two pianos positioned on stage and played by the very fine Derek Wang and Joel Wenhardt, Bell starts by listening to the music and eventually shifting into dance mode. Known for her musicality, Peck slowly brings Bell in companionship with the music. Building to a bundle of airy leaps and tightly wound turns, Bell allows the music to urge him forward, revealing his romantically classical line.

An audience favorite, Andrea Miller’s company Gallim oozed  onto the stage in primal, incremental motions made fuller by connecting to bodies in close proximity. Choreographed by Miller in collaboration with Rambert2 and The Juilliard School, SAMA  forges multi-celled organisms splitting and reforming in highly rhythmic, athletic combinations shaped by zombie like wide spread legs bent and hopping from light to left, arms out..

The mystery is extended when men on stilts in fringed pants (reminiscent of African folk forms) start to weave through the dancers erecting a fevered climax. 

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Celia Ipiotis