Fall for Dance at City Center is frequently a mixed bag: On the one hand you can, for a relatively cheap price, see not one but four different companies, in a usually very varied program; on the other hand, many of these well-diversified bills wind up with two to three duds and one very strong piece. Although this wasn’t quite the case with Program 1, it was clear that the first three performances were only build-up to the final work of the evening—Mark Morris’ world premiere Words.
Black Grace, a company blending western movement with traditional Samoan dance style, performed Minoi (with an all-male cast) and Pati Pati (which started out with a group of women who were later joined by men). Both pieces utilized body percussion, which the program note explained is a hallmark of Samoan dance. Minoi’s opening felt primal and powerful: The men stood in a V, bathed in a red-orange light, slapping their thighs and bare chests in rhythms that became increasingly intricate. When they added a sharp turn of the head and the flick of an arm, the whoosh that the movement produced as it sliced through the air was so different from the crackling body percussion that it felt revolutionary. But what started out as hypnotizing felt. by the end, somewhat repetitive and even cheerleader-ish.
San Francisco Ballet then presented Hans Van Manen’s icily bland Variations for Two Couples. Two couples took turns onstage, the women either in high développés à la seconde as their male partners tilted them off-center or being slid rapidly across the downstage space by their coolly detached attendants. Each couple was nearly interchangeable, often told apart solely by the color of the women’s unitards (either blue or purple), though Vanessa Zahorian (clad in blue) commanded a more puritan, regal presence.
Russell Maliphant’s Two x Two, danced by Yuan Yuan Tan (also of San Francisco Ballet) and Fang-Yi Sheu, felt – much like Minoi and Pati Pati – initially mesmerizing and later thin. The two women never moved from their solo spots (Ms. Sheu’s downstage left, Ms. Tan’s upstage right), and Mr. Maliphant’s choreography was something of a character study for port de bras. Their sinewy, slender arms carved through the space, first gently and eventually rapidly, producing magical traceforms that soon became more beautiful than the movement itself. Michael Hulls, lighting designer (with whom Maliphant has long collaborated) deserves particular credit for evoking such an eerie and beautiful atmosphere.