The Fall for Dance Festival at New York’s City Center opened its 21st season this week with an unsettling juxtaposition. Dancers of the National Ballet of Ukraine – who have valiantly continued to rehearse and perform under the most stressful conditions in Kyiv – made extraordinary efforts to travel to the US to perform Alexei Ratmansky’s Wartime Elegy, a dance he made in reaction to Russia’s invasion of his father's homeland.
The piece exudes a muted sorrow and dignified stoicism, with a slightly brittle edge notable in the dancers’ heroic leaps. Episodes of lighthearted folk dance deliberately unravel, betraying the exhaustion of ordinary people. Another reference to the consequences of war confronts us in the paintings and sketches by Matvei Vaisberg projected on the backdrop (scenic design by Wendall K. Harrington) which rough out bodies or sculptures in pieces, with faces partly obliterated.
It’s rare to see a dance that reflects the suffering of war performed by artists who continue to live that war, who bring the ongoing trauma in their community to the dance. One of the company’s own dancers, Oleksandr Shapoval, who had volunteered to fight in the war, was killed in battle in 2022. I don’t think the significance of this work, and of who was performing it, was lost on anyone in the theater.
The program closed with Andrea Miller’s super-charged SAMA, billed as a reaction to the “numbing of our bodies” in the digital age. A tour de force by the dancers of her company,Gallim, in which they convulse, twist and ricochet off the floor, in smoky lighting, to the relentless hammering of the score – the sum total of choreography, sound and lighting giving the impression of a population being shelled. Two male dancers roam the stage on stilts, looming threateningly over the proceedings.
Whether Miller’s commentary is on the dangers lurking on the internet or elsewhere, the violence depicted is inescapable. Her choreography makes the connection between physical violence and the state of being in thrall to shadowy titans who control the tech world. Her dancers act out extremes of helplessness, despair and rage, for there are no half-measures in Gaga, the explosive contemporary technique Miller learned during her time with Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva Ensemble. They embody those elements of conflict that remain shadowy in Ratmansky’s piece.
A feature on the Ukrainian dancers in the Times earlier this week noted that “tours provide relief from the constant stress and noise of incoming fire.” Principal dancer Natalia Matsak said, “Even though we’re working very hard, it’s like taking a break, because we can finally sleep.”
As the audience cheered the high-octane conclusion of SAMA, I wondered whether for some it had hit a raw nerve.
The title SAMA, Miller explains, is “a combination of the ancient Greek word for ‘body’ and Slovenian for ‘by herself.’” I thought about how it also happens to mean 'together' in Tagalog, and how we may all somehow be implicated in this violence.
Tucked between these two works was Tiler Peck’s captivating Piano Songs for American Ballet Theatre’s Aran Bell and mischievous pianists Derek Wang and Joel Wenhardt. They gave off the casual vibe of three college kids blowing off steam while quarantined in their dorm room during pandemic – well, a room that accommodates two grand pianos and a bunch of turning jumps. Set to three whimsical pieces by Meredith Monk, the work premiered at the Vail Dance Festival earlier in the summer. It reveals a pensive, mercurial side of Bell that we don’t generally get to see when he’s acting a prince or a Montague but fans of his grands pirouettes and his airy beaten jumps were not disappointed. At several points he gestures facetiously to his pals to tone down their playing. It’s like signalling that not all performance needs to rain down like mortar fire.
