Posts Tagged ‘Fall for Dance’

Fall for Dance, Indoors and Out

September 28, 2013

It’s hard to give focus to ensemble work.  City Center’s annual Fall for Dance series generally showcases newer work, but In the first two programs—one outdoors, one in—an older work showed us how it’s done. Indoors, it was the duets that focused our attention.

On Wednesday, September 25, in the first indoor program (repeated on the 26th), the duets—ballet and tango—were book-ended by two companies presenting very different modern-dance ensemble works—one, ballet-inflected, to ragtime; the other, old-fashioned, literal-minded romanticism.

Boys Playing Music_Luca Della Robbia_FlorenceLuca Della Robbia, Boys Playing Music

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NYC Fall for Dance II

September 28, 2008

The second Fall for Dance program I saw, last Thursday, prompted reflections on the differences between modern dance and ballet, and why, over the years, I’ve increasingly gravitated toward the latter. 

The ballet on the bill was The Suzanne Farrell Ballet in Pithoprakta, “Action by Probabilities”, choreographed by Balanchine in 1968 for Farrell (his last great muse) and Arthur Mitchell. Set to spiky electronic music by Iannis Xenakis, the ballet had a short life—after Farrell left the company the following year, it was dropped from the repertory.  Read on