The BAAND Together Dance Festival at Lincoln Center is celebrating its third birthday, a milestone in our post-pandemic world where theaters and companies are shuttering at record rates. It spotlights top-tier, uptown dance troupes with name recognition: Ballet Hispánico, American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York City Ballet and Dance Theatre of Harlem, banding together (forgive me; I couldn’t resist) in a heartwarming show of unity. Beyond the kumbaya vibes, the veritable pu pu platter acts as a sales pitch for the coming season. Who will make it into your wallet and onto your calendar?
Ballet Hispánico performs Línea Recta (2016) by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Lopez Ochoa is an excellent choreographer, but this disappoints, melding flamenco with a Jiří Kylián aesthetic. While striking at times, it relies on tropes, gimmicks, props and pretty faces to manifest intrigue.
The piece opens with Amanda del Valle having her yards-long, ruffled train straightened like a bride. What follows is a bad fairy tale where del Valle must submit to men who spool the fiery tail around her. The sublime Gabrielle Sprauve, who has no tail but little agency, spends much of her time being spun around two men’s limbs as if she’s a strand of spaghetti. Later, bare-chested hunks arc their bodies in crescent moon shapes, and a bevy of beauties twirl their wrists while smoldering. Lacy fans flutter, scribbled roses wink from the cyclorama, and then, once every cliché associated with flamenco has been exhausted, it’s over. For what it’s worth, I bet Línea Recta looks stunning in still pictures, all that ersatz intensity promising a duende that’s dully delivered.
A tepid drink of water follows with Ballet Theatre’s rendition of Jerome Robbins’ Other Dances (1976). Created for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, then at the heights of their technical and interpretative powers, this version of the traditional pas de deux presents Gillian Murphy and Aran Bell.
If you can imagine sound as its own physical space with four walls, a floor, and a ceiling, then the Frédéric Chopin score (one waltz, four mazurkas) evokes a narrow, winding hall of windows. The trick is to dance within the music's contours while emotionally conveying the wonders that lay beyond. Seemingly nervous, Bell regularly bangs into the sonic architecture, jumping too high and landing with an unsettled thud. Murphy fares better with ballerina-in-a-music-box arabesques, but she never settles into the display of pure technique that reveals an artist’s subtleties. One last caveat: Can the costumes (a sheer nightie for her, booties and puffy sleeves for him) be redone? They look pulled from a Saturday Night Live sketch parodying ballet.
Try to contain your smile when Dance Theatre of Harlem takes the stage with Robert Garland’s Nyman String Quartet No. 2. Finding the sweet spot between class and sass, the men and women, attired in circus-striped athleisure, groove with flexed feet and sissone with joy. The dissonance between classical ballet and club dancing may be too abrupt for some as it was for my plus-one (point taken!), but remember how sound can be a physical space? Here, the academic piqué turns and coupé jetés streak horizontally rather than soar or swoop up and down the vertical axis. And so the dance lives comfortably within Michael Nyman’s score of chocolatey romanticism and toe-tapping ebullience. You’d be mad if I didn’t tell you about Kouadio Davis’s gorgeous solo. He produces a skilled performance while being completely, authentically himself. Well, that’s the goal, isn’t it, whether you’re an artist or average Joe?
After three lengthy numbers, the world premiere of Pas de O’Farrill by Pedro Ruiz to the music of Latin jazz great Arturo O’Farrill fizzes in all the right ways. Gamely performed by Alexa Maxwell (City Ballet) and Antonio Cangiano (Ballet Hispánico), the duo pitches their pelvises forward in ballroom promenade and wiggles their hips like they mean it. Geometric arabesques dissolve into cheeky parallel passés, and slinky turns explode into dramatic lifts. Quoting openly from competitive Hustle, Salsa, and Latin, it’s one exclamation point after another. While longer than the typical showcase routine, Pas de O’Farrill doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Ailey does what Ailey does best: bring the house down. In excerpts from Dancing Spirit (2009, new production 2023), the company blisters through Ronald K. Brown’s West African-infused choreography. The dancers’ bodies are polyphonic lines of movement, with punchy weight changes, hip rolls and shrugging shoulders happening concurrently. The company, always so charismatic, maintains a cohesiveness even as your eye toggles among the fine performers. Hannah Alissa Richardson, though, shines as the north star in the constellation, her regal bearing belying a warm spirit.
Some folks considered that the finale and vamoosed. Their loss. Although Justin Peck’s The Times Are Racing (2017) has been around City Ballet’s block a few times, its gender-neutral casting in principal roles gives the composition temporal flexibility. The narrative strands can be permeated with a fresh zeitgeist depending on what the world needs that zeitgeist to be. Also, it’s just a damn fine piece with Peck’s street choreography for ballet dancers fitting tab-A-slot-B into Dan Deacon’s propulsive score. This artistic handshake melds into a potent expression of early 21st-century Americana that, if our future AI overlords allow it, will live a long life in the vein of Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
Peter Walker and Brittany Pollack have fun frolicking as the ringleading hoofers, but Victor Abreu and Daniel Applebaum captivate in the central pas de deux. Lingering looks, tender dips, agonizingly slow turns, and an undeniable chemistry plant you in their universe even when the horde returns for fleet footwork and more clump formations. Love is love.
