Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Linda Celeste Sims and Kirven J. Boyd in Paul Taylors Arden Court. Photo by Paul Kolnik
The year 2012 can wait until my next column. But let’s hope for—let’s go so far as to look forward to—dance events as memorable as those that took place in the closing week of 2011.
Winding up its annual City Center season, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gave an admirable rendition of Paul Taylor’s 1981 Arden Court, a new addition to its repertory. It wasn’t always easy or comfortable for them to recreate Taylor’s overarching and paradoxical tone of balletic burliness, but they pulled it off—and with panache, I almost don’t have to add.
A couple of days later, at the 19th-century Park Avenue Armory, came the final performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. It put on one of its venerable “events”—a reweaving of excerpts from company repertory—and did so in singular fashion for the occasion, simultaneously occupying three argyle-shaped stages at the Armory.
Cunningham’s work has always had a sense of the antic, and indeed this “event” could have registered as the company’s own take on a three-ring circus.
But the Armory was very dark for the 50-minute duration, suggesting a planetarium, as the ceiling seemed to vanish into the vault of the infinite. Ostensible cloud formations that looked like clusters of ping-pong balls were suspended above the dancers, diffusing beams of light that shone from indirect vantage points.
It had the faint flavor of 1960s happenings, in which Cunningham and his company once participated. At the same time, there was the recollection of a Renaissance ballroom, where dance spectacles were once made to embody a microcosm of the galaxies. The presence at the Armory of musicians perched on parapets, lodged against all four walls, resulted in sounds that were sometimes near, sometimes far off in the interstellar ambient.
You could watch from observation platforms one story above the dancers and thus view the action in wide-range perspective. You could also sit—or most likely stand—by one stage and let the action come to you. Keeping an eye on the middle and far distance ensured a realization of moments when the three stages coalesced into epic synchronization. More often, each stage contained independent and disjunctive incidents. There was a certain poignancy in not being able to totally apprehend all of the movement information being transmitted, particularly since this was our final opportunity to see this company.
The dancers performed with an intensity appropriate to the momentous occasion. The year in dance thus closed in a fabulous setting with a farewell to a great company and a provocative experiment in perception.
Read more by Joel Lobenthal at lobenthal.com.
