Every year at New York City Center’s Fall for Dance sampler, audiences go wild for everything. It’s easy to see why. It’s exciting to watch an international array of world-class dancers in different styles show their stuff, especially when ticket prices are take-a-chance low. And if the mixed-bag shows often contain duds, each Fall for Dance program usually has something good, or even great.
Some selections at the festival, which opened on Tuesday night, are surefire. Ronald K. Brown’s “Grace,” which Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is performing on Program 5, always gives a spiritual lift. Other choices pique curiosity. Will the combination of the sunny Memphis jookin’ virtuoso Lil Buck and the astonishing bass-baritone Davóne Tines (on Program 2) be as powerful as it sounds on paper? How will dancers from Paris Opera Ballet handle the American aesthetic of Jerome Robbins’s classic “Afternoon of a Faun” on Program 3?
Olga Smirnova, a Russian currently dancing for Dutch National Ballet, is one of the most thrilling ballerinas in the world right now, but will Rudi van Dantzig’s “Romeo and Juliet” pas de deux (making its New York debut on Program 4) be a vehicle worth her talent? What kind of work is made by Clara Furey, a Canadian choreographer on Program 2? Or by I-Ling Liu, a Taiwanese choreographer on Program 5?
For City Center regulars, most of Program 1 is more familiar. “Dance Is a Mother” debuted earlier this year on the Artists at the Center program of New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns. It was choreographed by Jamar Roberts, a top dancemaker formerly with the Ailey company who also performs in it. For these veteran dancers, “Dance Is a Mother” is about keeping at it.
The work is part ensemble piece, part star vehicle. Roberts and the three other dancers who join Mearns — great ones like the current Ailey member Jacquelin Harris and the alum Jeroboam Bozeman — each get solos and blend with Mearns, but she is still set apart. From time to time, she doubles over, hands on knees, or looks around pensively, a little lost. Dance is a hard mother.
The lumpy psychological material is less interesting, though, than the now infrequent chance to see Roberts in his own work. This dance is particularly rooted in his big-man physicality. The choreography twists and travels, but its focus is so much on the torso and arms that the rare pirouette or jump stands out. Those arms are graceful shape-makers but have the urgent pull of someone trying to escape from a straitjacket. They sculpt the air around the body to express Roberts’s always keen reaction to the music.
The music here is from an album that the composer Caroline Shaw made with Attacca Quartet, which performs it live without her. The vocalist Raquel Acevedo Klein joins for two gorgeous songs about loss and time and the transfiguring power of music. Roberts’s dance, with a tenderly collegial duet for him and Mearns, isn’t at that level, though it’s nice to see again.
“The Man I Love” was made for a 2023 Artists at the Center program by the tap dancers Dario Natarelli and Michelle Dorrance. The music is a little odd: a recording of an orchestral version of the Gershwin standard to which the cellist Derek Louie plays along live.
Natarelli seems to be waiting for someone when Louie arrives, but they aren’t that compatible. Tapping to music this slow is exceedingly difficult; tap sounds, lacking sustain, must be exactly right not to feel intrusive. For a while, Natarelli taps at double the song’s tempo, but then he just seems frustrated. The choreography is even more based in Dorrance’s physicality (elbows that jut, slides that splay) than Roberts’s piece is in his. Maybe she would have the finesse to fill out the song; Natarelli, for all his talent, doesn’t.
“Dust” is new to New York, though it isn’t new. The kathak and contemporary choreographer Akram Khan made it for the English National Ballet in 2013, and Tamara Rojo brought it with her when she became director of San Francisco Ballet, which performs it here.
It’s about World War I, so there’s an inclined mound at the rear of the stage, a trench into which the men disappear. The women who remain go to work, swinging invisible hammers and rising on their toes as if stretched from above. A shellshocked duet shows the difficulty of reconnection.
The work has some of the same problems as the flashy, hokey “Giselle” that Khan made for English National. It doesn’t help that Jocelyn Pook’s score is laden with clichés, though the inclusion of an archival soldier song is touching. Khan is good at effects, as when dancers in a line join arms and their conjoined limbs eerily appear to become an undulant eel. A tortured man at the start makes faces with his bare shoulder blades.
But these effects are just effects. If you see enough Fall for Dance programs, you can learn that truly expressive choreography needs more than that. Dance is a mother.
Fall for Dance
Through Sept. 27 at City Center; nycitycenter.org.
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