The inspired and the prosaic at Fall for Dance at New York City Center

The inspired marriage of Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins and Roderick George in program 3 of Fall for Dance acquired a last-minute addition, giving us not one but two glimpses of Hugo Marchand and Hannah O’Neill from the Paris Opera.

The program opener was a slow burn, eventually igniting with a glorious elemental force. Lucinda Childs has been making work since the 1960s at Judson and has still not run out of spellbinding patterns. In Three Dances (for prepared piano) John Cage, eight dancers from Gibney Dance moved crisply through phrases that repeated and accreted, with changes in spatial orientation and changes in who did what when, so that a modest collection of steps blossomed into a microcosm of a perfectly-ordered world.

Small objects placed between the piano strings resulted in sound that evoked the Indonesian gamelan in the first dance, water gurgling through pipes in the second and a complete meltdown at Mission Control in the third. The ensemble repeatedly splintered then withdrew back into the safety of a cluster. I cracked up every time a pair of dancers bounced out of the pack into a warrior-like pose: a wide lunge with their hands making some wacky shape, like a crown or antlers on their head, or holding a pretend spyglass to one eye. With our world on fire, these moments affirmed the hilarity and futility of warlike posturing.

The power of the multitude was also a galvanizing principle in Roderick George’s Missing Fruit (Part I) for his project-based company kNoname Artist, a standout in last year’s festival. This visceral and emotionally resonant work treated the dehumanizing experiences of Black, Indigenous and people of color. Woven throughout were chilling moments and moments of hard-won joy, heightened by Connor Sale’s stunning lighting design and by the soundtrack from slowdanger which incorporated an often hostile chanting by distorted voices, dance beats and excerpts from iconic songs like Nina Simone’s ‘Strange Fruit’. A sense of claustrophobia competed with a feeling of expansiveness expressed in heroic sweeping movements and evanescent feats of balance.

The piece opened with Joseph Markey bathed in a reddish glow, slow-mo running in place, his lips moving in sync with a snarling voiceover; others barely visible in the gloom struggled to help each other off the ground. Apart from a final virtuosic grappling between Markey and George, interactions between the dancers were brief and stormy, as a dancer was roughed up or yanked to safety. Riveting solos – MJ Edwards spinning off-kilter, Jacquelin Harris reaching resolutely through the gloom – conjured despair or determination. In the pulsating ensemble work, there was a sense of shared sorrows and a treacherous path to freedom. You understood there would be a lynching but you never saw it coming.

Paris Opera Ballet étoile Hannah O’Neill made a stunning debut in Jerome Robbins’ eternal Afternoon of a Faun. This dreamlike encounter set in a ballet studio was buttressed by a lush, sparkling performance of Debussy by Alex Sopp and Michael Scales on flute and piano. O’Neill was perfectly matched with Marchand: not just in physical attributes, stretchy and sleek, but in perplexed self-absorption. They gazed out at us as if searching in an imaginary mirror for insight that eluded them in the reality of the studio. Their shy interactions, capped by a tender kiss on the cheek, were performed with grave delicacy. Yet the image that most struck me was that of her in profile, shaded by a gauzy scrim, approaching and later leaving the studio, gingerly picking her way on pointe with those legs that go on for days.

In a bonus offering, the pair locked lips with the sturdiness of suction cups in the duet from Angelin Preljocaj’s Le Parc, the bit with the flying kiss which has long been strip-mined on TikTok. The full-length ballet is an elaborate dance of seduction among the French aristocracy that traverses 18th and 20th century conventions. 

Torn from this specific ornamental context, the pas de deux of a mutual surrender to passion sank to the prosaic: the sight of O’Neill in a boyfriend shirt and briefs in front of a glowing portal suggested that she had come down to the kitchen in the small hours to raid the fridge and chanced upon this gorgeous man in knee-breeches and a poet’s blouse. They rubbed their heads on each other’s chests and made weird hand gestures, none of which required the ballet technique they’ve trained for decades to acquire, apart from a Superman lift which, considering how tall they both are and how long his arms are, put her at a spectacular distance from the ground.The viral flying kiss was child's play in comparison: conservation of angular momentum did most of the work. Frustratingly, this last minute addition to the bill did not give New Yorkers an opportunity to see these étoiles really dance.