Pot Luck

Fall for Dance, Program 3
"Eu danço—8 Solos no Geral", "Pheromones", "Maninyas", "Brandenburgs"
Companhia Urbana de Dança, Fang-Yi Sheu and Herman Cornejo, Houston Ballet, Paul Taylor Dance Company
City Center
New York, NY
October 6, 2015

The annual Fall for Dance at City Center offers a brief taste of different types of dancing on each program, almost guaranteeing that the audience with enjoy at least one piece. The audience is adventurous and appreciative and the dancers respond, even if the material isn't first rate.  Tuesday's program opened with the Brazilian hip hop group Companhia Urbana de Dança. The nine dancers (eight men and one woman) performed in grey grunge (costumes credited to Rio Urban Out Fit) to electronic music against a background of grey industrial chic. The dancers, loose-limbed and daring, were vigorous and appealing but the piece was far too long for its limited vocabulary and emotionally hollow atmosphere. The dancers meandered through the same snaky moves without any sense of competition or conflict; each seemed to dance in his own little energetic bubble.  The ending, with the dancers running in circles, becoming pairs, then trios and finally a unified group was quite effective, but the group hug feeling didn't seem related to anything happening before.

  Fang-Yi Sheu, formerly with the Martha Graham Company, teamed with current ABT dancer Herman Cornejo for Sheu's "Pheromones" to the plangent, melancholy music of Philip Grass' "Facades".  Sheu's choreography oozed through the music as the couple seemed to trade command--Cornejo stood while she crawled and then the power shifted.  They moved with a concentrated and pliant urgency, suggesting underwater creatures.  It was like watching two aggressive anemones rocked by currents, mysterious and haunting.

 The Houston Ballet's "Maninyas" choreo- graphed by Stanton Welch, its Artistic Director, aimed for mystery, as the ten dancers emerged frequently from long, billowing curtains.  The five couples were distinguished by color, the men were bare-chested and the women wore elegant, swirling gowns (designed by Welch) which they hiked up at regular intervals.

The dancers looked strong and attractive, especially the men, but the ballet was somewhat limited, as the dancers had to spend an inordinate amount of time staring blankly at the audience alternatively hiding their eyes and doing chicken arms; it was effect without content. The heart of the work was a long pas de deux for the woman in red (Karina Gonzalez) and the man in blue (Ian Casady) inspired, it seemed, by ice dancing, with a lot of flashy lifts. They had previously shown no interest in each other and were back to their color-coordinated partners for the finale, so all the heavy lifting didn't add up to much.

Paul Taylor's "Branden- burgs", to a selection of Bach's concertos, was a welcome counterpoint to Welch's pretty but shallow meanderings through ballet technique. For all Taylor's barefoot boys, "Brandenburgs" seems to have been inspired by ballet; the one man (Michael Trusnovec) and three women with distinctive solos (Michelle Fleet, Parisa Khobdeh and Eran Bugge) seem to be a comment on Balanchine's "Apollo". It could be a sequel showing us Apollo after he reached Parnassus still playing with his muses. Trusnovec combines elegance with forthrightness. He is the god next door, and his brief solo, as he stood in a golden light looked like the winged Mercury had come to life.  

copyright © 2015 by Mary Cargill