Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Looking to the past and present: Dance Reflections gets underway strikingly with LA(HORDE)’s ROOM WITH A VIEW and Lucinda Childs’ DANCE

• By drediman
• October 22, 2023
• No Comments

This past week, the New York iteration of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections – a sweeping and ambitious contemporary dance festival presented in conjunction with some of the city’s most influential performing arts institutions (e.g., New York City Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, NYU Skirball, The Joyce Theater) – got underway with a couple of striking performances that looked to the past and present for inspiration. Read on for my thoughts on them.

LUCINDA CHILDS & PHILIP GLASS: DANCE
Lyon Opera Ballet at New York City Center

Looking to the past was a smart way to kick off the festival, and few works are more ideal for that honor than Lucinda Childs’ seminal Dance (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), which was performed this weekend by the Lyon Opera Ballet at New York City Center. Created in 1979, the hypnotic and exhilarating piece marked the first major collaboration between Childs and iconic minimalist composer Philip Glass (to great fanfare, both Childs and Glass made an appearance at curtain call), who would later sync up to come up with the legendary avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach. Comprised of just a few relentlessly repeated steps over the course of three movements – performed with lightness and freedom by seventeen exquisite dancers – the work draws the viewer in with its purity and glacial yet inevitable progression. As set against the meticulously calibrated screening of the original Sol LeWitt film, Dance is also a captivating meditation on the ephemeral nature of dance via the dynamic interplay between film documentation and the transpiring of live performance.

(LA)HORDE & RONE: ROOM WITH A VIEW
Ballet National de Marseille at NYU Skirball

Dance Reflections’ first week also saw the anticipated American premiere of Room with a View (RECOMMENDED) by choreographic collective (LA)HORDE and electronica virtuoso Rone. Created in 2020 at Paris’s Theatre du Chatelet as the first collaboration between (LA)HORDE and the Ballet National de Marseille, the work represents the present of contemporary dance. Fitting snugly on NYU Skirball’s large stage, the elaborate production – which is set in and around a monumental, tremulous marble quarry – initially presents an apocalyptic vision of humanity, one in which self-serving individualism is paramount. As the piece unfolds, the audience is taken on a tense, often violent journey from chaos and discord and to hard won community and unified open rebellion – as thrillingly depicted in (LA)HORDE’s cacophonic, ultimately throbbing choreography. Guiding the turbulent progression is none other than Rone, who exuberantly mixes the work’s electronic soundscapes live onstage alongside the fearless, diverse dancers. Despite the harshness of it all, there are a few unexpected flashes of beauty and tenderness that shined like beacons in the midst of all the overwhelming bleakness.