Fall for Dance in Orange County - the full write up

(Another Project Bandaloop video, just because it was kind of fun!)

For the last two years, I've observed New York City Center's Fall for Dance festival with awe and jealousy - they offered tickets to an amazing bunch of dance performances for only $10! So this year, I was very excited when the Orange County Performing Arts Center announced it would be doing its own version of Fall for Dance.

I went to the Thursday and Saturday nights of the festival, catching both Programs A and B. The best part of the whole thing was the chance to see a huge range of dance companies and styles that I normally wouldn't see - either because of geography, or because they're out of my "usual" range of dance viewing. I'll admit it: I'm into ballet and the 'big' stuff, and usually go for things that are performing at the larger halls. Not that I'm not open to cultural dance or smaller contemporary things, it's just harder to get there with time constraints and all the driving involved. Fall for Dance put everything in one place, and made it low risk to do so: for only $10 it didn't matter if I didn't like everything on the program, it was okay to just try it out.

In New York, Fall for Dance has become a decidedly hip affair, based on reports from the blogosphere. I wouldn't characterize the Orange County Fall for Dance as necessarily "hip", from my casual glances around the auditorium and outside. But, the festival certainly did attract a different kind of crowd than the usual older ballet subscribers: Families! Lots of them, with kids young and older, all out watching dance together. Yes, the families come to OCPAC on Sunday afternoons when there are story ballets, but it was interesting to see them watching contemporary dance and responding vocally to it (and it was all mostly family friendly, except for the 10 seconds of boob from the Dutch - more on that later!).

Like I said in my last blog post, I ended up being most interested in the things that were not my usual fare. SRISHTI-Nina Rajarani Dance Creations, which opened Program A on Thursday night, was hugely surprising and enjoyable - the company used classical Indian dance and music as a foundation, but the men were dressed up in business suits and ties, surrounded by multimedia video imagery of modern day London. The video showed the dancers doing classical Indian dances on the streets of London - in front of cars that were stuck at interesections! - and in another section of video, a dancer was dancing inside a glass elevator, moving up and down the side of a glass walled office building. The juxtaposition of this Indian culture against a very Western world was fascinating, conveying a people traveling around inside a modern world but nevertheless using the language that formed their cultural identity. And of course I just loved watching the dancing itself, which was highly skilled, fast and precise: the six dancers quickly zipped across the stage in formations, going in and around musicians at the side of the stage. (Photo by Hugo Glendinning.)

For different reasons, I liked Charles Moulton/The Ball Passing Project opening Program B on Saturday night. The performance was total goofball and a lot of fun to watch. There wasn't really much technique or "dance" per se, just a riser packed with 60 people (volunteers mostly, according to the program), who passed rubber balls around to each other very quickly and in different patterns, all set to music. This video shows the same piece, but with a smaller group of dancers - imagine that on a much, much larger scale (see the above left photo from curtain call), and you get an idea of what we saw. The piece appealed to my basic attraction for visual spectacle with all those arms moving in patterned unison, and in large numbers; it was silly, whimsical and totally fun.

Via Katlehong Dance from South Africa, closing Program A on Thursday, was another great surprise. They performed a colorful, street style, sort-of hip-hop dance that was pure energy and wit. In sneakers, they showed really, really fast footwork, slapped their boots and clapped their hands, creating as much music with their bodies as was coming off the loudspeakers. I loved the energy of it, and it was so uplifting to see so much motion and music on stage.


Both shows ended with Project Bandaloop out on OCPAC's plaza. OCPAC's presenters have been finding more and more ways to use the giant, blank and blindingly white side wall of the theater lately (all summer long and at the Merce Cunningham event in May, they showed movies on it). At Fall for Dance, they took things a bit further by sending Project Bandaloop down the wall with ropes to perform an aerial ballet. Thursday night, I was too preoccupied with thinking, "Oh my god, their hanging from the wall," to really pay much attention to what they were actually doing, but Saturday night it was pretty fun to watch them swing around and create shapes with their bodies and the swinging ropes. At some points, they used the wall as a vertical floor space, which was an interesting thing to ponder, as the tension of the ropes gave them a kind of alternate gravity. Other times they just swung around and created the ooh-aah effect in the audience, like we were watching Cirque du Soleil.

It's not that I didn't like the ballet companies that I'm used to. I knew what I was getting from them and got it - no surprises - and several of them came off very well, too. Pacific Northwest Ballet's performance of Nacho Duato's Jardi Tancat on Thursday night was quietly beautiful - the only work that we got to see in full on the entire Fall for Dance series. Martha Graham Dance Company gave a powerful performance of sections II & II from Sketches from Chronicle, a piece representing the ravages of war that Martha Graham choreographed in 1936. Its true that the choreography and movement style is kind of old fashioned and dated, but I thought it was still very valuable to see the choreography as a document of one of modern dance's most important choreographers. And especially to see the piece as well performed as was on Saturday night, that was great stuff - Jennifer DePalo, who also stood out for me in many roles that I saw her do in New York last month, gave a particularly powerful performance as the woman in white.

There was also Alonzon King's LINES Ballet, with fantastic dancers doing King's contemporary choreography; it was classical technique but on flat foot. On Saturday night we got pieces of new choreography from a new work that the company will premiere in full at its home theater later this season - but still that was a lot to see. There was a craggy pas de deux where the two dancers climbed over and beneath each other, extending out into what looks like it is going to be a usual pretty ballet move, but then breaking and twisting it into an angular, almost ugly image; then they'd roll across and try it again. Whatever it was they were trying to accomplish (I'm not going to even pretend to venture an interpretation), it was fascinating to watch, maybe because the dancers were so into it. In other parts of the piece, it was worth it to just watch the beautiful dancers executing difficult ballet steps with poise.

Same goes for the two dancers from the Dutch National Ballet, who performed Before After on Saturday night. The program note says that the duet is about "the struggle of two people longing to be together but knowing the relationship is coming to an end." On stage, we saw a rather violent and jumpy pas de deux where the two dancers flung each other around and showed off lots of flexibility and high extensions. Like LINES, it was sans pointe shoes. And then, at the very end, they both took their shirts off, so we got some boobage as well. It was all very typically dark and European in the Forsythe (but not quite there) manner. But the two dancers, Marisa Lopez and Juanjo Arquez, were spectacular.

The only ballet company that disappointed was Boston Ballet, who performed a pas de deux excerpt from Val Caniparoli's Lady of the Cammelias. Maybe because the pas de deux was taken out of context, but the choreography looked overly fussy and messy, vaguely Kenneth MacMillan-esque with the complicated lifts but none of the structure or emotion. And the two dancers looked like they were in different worlds: Romi Beppu was far too ballet-pretty and unconvincing in mime, and Nelson Madrigal was, well, not in Lady of the Cammelias. It was disappointing to see the only pointe-shoe representation in the Fall For Dance program be so boring.


On Thursday, the program was rounded out by two dancers from Susan Marshall & Company in Kiss, an aerial pas de deux of sorts, where the two dancers were attached to harnesses hanging low on ropes coming out of the flies. Their feet could reach the ground if they stood up, but for the most part, they hung sideways and twisted around in the air, elaborately wrapped around each other while, as the title suggests, they kissed. The work progressed slowly and hypnotically, yet at the same time held an element of aggression, with the kind of force that the dancers used to push up and away from the ground and each other. Kiss provided a nice contrast to the other works on the program, as it was very contemporary and conceptual, and also had a much more overt and erotic theme than the other pieces on the Thursday program. Some kids killed the mood a little bit during the beginning of the performance: they giggled and went "ooh" as the curtain went up on the two necking dancers (on Thursday, Kristen Hollinsworth and Luke Miller).

Rennie Harris Puremovent, comprised of Rennie Harris and 7 other men doing hip-hop, closed out Saturday night's show. As skilled as they all apparently were, it was unfortunately a rather sloppy performance. Their set looked completely slapped together - they barely did anything before halfheartedly switching to something else. The dancers got a chance to improvise hip-hop some, but it wasn't nearly enough. Especially when comparing Puremovement's performance to the high energy "street" dance of Via Katlehong Dance on Thursday night, it was a bit of a disappointing finish to Program B.

But overall, the whole event was very good, and the range of the dancing was also very good. Next year - and I hope that there is a next year! - it would be nice to see more complete works on the bill, though I know the point is to see as many companies as possible. Jardi Tancat with Pacific Northwest Ballet came off beautifully, so perhaps some selection of shorter, but still full and complete, ballets would work, too.