Since its founding in the 1960s, Lincoln Center has been New York City’s fanciest headquarters for opera, classical music and ballet. It is seldom remembered, though, that back at the start it was also a home for modern dance.
When the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch) opened in 1964, it housed not just the New York City Ballet but also the American Dance Theater. This was a repertory company created for the State Theater that performed a range of modern dance, including works by José Limón, Anna Sokolow and Donald McKayle, prominent choreographers who shared the leadership role.
Many in modern dance welcomed the resident company as an opportunity to gain access to advantages associated with European opera and ballet companies: larger theaters and audiences, financial support, stability. Macy’s, the department store, paid for a full-page ad (twice) in The New York Times touting modern dance as “one of the most interesting forms of entertainment around” — a vote of confidence novel enough that The Times ran an article about the ad with the headline “Modern Dance Is ‘In.’”
The performances sold well and garnered encouraging reviews, yet the experiment lasted only two seasons. What went wrong? Some said the stage was too big or considered the repertory idea to conflict with the form’s defining emphasis on individual aesthetics and techniques. (Merce Cunningham, among others, insisted on using his own dancers.) Others blamed the absence of the matriarch, Martha Graham. “She is always invited first and always declines,” Limón said.
But the main problem, unsurprisingly, was money. The first season was paid for by the recently created New York State Council on the Arts. This was pilot funding, meant to inspire others to step in. Lincoln Center did, for one more season. And then no one else.
Fast forward to this week and the debut at Lincoln Center of a new Contemporary Dance Festival (June 18-July 5). In the years since American Dance Theater, the descendants of modern dance have performed at Lincoln Center with varying frequency. But the new festival counts as the center’s biggest commitment since the early years and part of the reason this year’s Summer for the City series is being called Summer of Dance.
What made this possible? Money. Last year, the philanthropists Lynn and Richard Pasculano gave Lincoln Center $50 million to establish the Pasculano Collaborative for Contemporary Dance.
“American Dance Theater was a short-lived moment,” said Donald Borror, the collaborative’s director. “But we are excited to draw a line from then to what it looks like today for contemporary dance to have a solid place on the Lincoln Center campus.”
“The festival is the tent pole,” he added. The plan is for it to recur every June, with an international focus, and every January, with a focus on U.S. companies. All tickets are pay-what-you-choose.
But what is contemporary dance? “We aren’t answering that question,” Borror said, “we’re asking it each time.”
Meiyin Wang, Lincoln Center’s director of contemporary programs, said the festival was trying to support artists who answered that question in distinct ways. Discussing curation, she and Borror stressed collaboration, citing the regular input of guest curators. In selecting the first lineup, they had the assistance of the prominent choreographer Kyle Abraham.
“At the start, we were just putting a ton of names together of artists we’re excited by,” Abraham said in an interview. “Then we began thinking about how they can be in conversation with one another.”
One theme Wang noted was lineage. Jeremy Nedd, who opens the festival, is a Brooklyn-born choreographer who works in Switzerland — and was an early member of Abraham’s company. Nedd’s “from rock to rock … aka how magnolia was taken for granite” transplants popular dances like the Milly Rock and the Electric Slide into an Arctic zone of abstraction that doesn’t exclude cheeky humor.
Yinka Esi Graves is a British flamenco dancer of Ghanaian and Jamaican heritage. In “The Disappearing Act,” a performance-art-style solo with live music, she alludes to the often-overlooked African roots of flamenco. The Korean choreographer Sung Im Her studied at the Belgian school P.A.R.T.S., founded by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. In “1 Degree Celsius,” a work for an ensemble that resembles supple robots dancing at a club, she shows her roots by quoting an arm-swinging pivot from de Keersmaeker’s seminal work “Fase.”
Bigger names close out the festival. The French-Algerian choreographer Rachid Ouramdane offers “Torde,” a duet that doesn’t fit as neatly into the lineage theme, unless you connect its perpetual spinning to dervishes. (It was performed in New York in 2016.) But Akram Khan, a British Bangladeshi, has been crossing classical Indian dance with contemporary modes for decades. His “Thikra: A Night of Remembering,” a U.S. premiere being described as the last work he will make for his company, is an invented ritual for a tribe of women, heavy on hair whipping.
“It’s about dreaming,” Abraham said of the festival’s international reach and its potential impact on the American scene. “I’ve had the opportunity to go abroad and see the scenography and production levels that greater funding makes possible, way beyond what in the U.S. we call ‘lights and tights.’ It’s important to watch artists dream bigger.”
Like many festival curators, Wang and Abraham touted the connections viewers can make if they attend multiple shows, but Abraham also stressed how the flexible pricing makes that easier. “Here you can actually see every show without doling out hundreds of dollars,” he said.
The performances will take place in Alice Tully Hall, which seats less than half as many people as the Koch. Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, said Alice Tully is underused in the summer. “We asked ‘What would it take to make it viable for a dance festival?” she said. “The answer was ‘Not much.’” The collaborative ordered a removable, shock-absorbing sprung floor.
As part of Summer in the City, the festival joins other dance traditions that have been accruing at the center in recent years, including a social dance series and the popular BAAND Together program (which rounds up New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theater of Harlem and Ballet Hispanico.)
New this year is Dance Encounters, an outdoor series squeezed onto Hearst Plaza next to the Milstein reflecting pool. On one end of the schedule, Omari Wiles, one of the choreographers who just won a Tony Award for “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” on Broadway, brings his ballroom-themed “New York Is Burning,” complete with a mini ball (June 17-18). On the other, the Chinese-born choreographer-painter Shen Wei merges dance with live painting in a work for Guangdong Modern Dance Company (July 22-24).
Borror noted how the Pasculano gift allowed for long-term planning and a perspective that stretches beyond Lincoln Center.
“There’s a lot of seed planting,” he said. “We want to be a part of building a sustainable way to get work from studio to stage.”
“The gift from the Pasculanos has really shifted what we think of as our responsibility to the field,” Thake said. First, though, come more modest goals.
“We want to show what’s possible when international companies can come to New York and what a vibrant contemporary dance audience there is here,” she said. For this summer, at least, contemporary dance is in.
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