Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Summer dance roundup at Lincoln Center: BAAND Together Dance Festival returns and Kyle Abraham’s REQUIEM shimmers

• By drediman
• August 16, 2022
• No Comments

This past week, I took in a number of wonderfully accessible dance performances courtesy of Lincoln Center’s expansive Summer for the City programming. Here are my thoughts, as per usual.

REQUIEM: FIRE IN THE AIR OF THE EARTH
Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center

One of the most compelling and fascinating nights of dance I encountered thus far this summer was the New York premiere of Kyle Abraham’s new work Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), particularly as danced by the choreographer’s own fabulously cohesive company, A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham. The organically-structured evening length piece – which only took the stage three times at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater – claims Mozart’s Requiem in D minor completely for its own purposes, recasting the iconic score within the context of Jlin’s pungent electronic soundscape and creating an Afro-Futurist view of death and reincarnation. Both layered and voluptuous, with touches of humor sprinkled throughout, Abraham’s version of Requiem drew me in with its rich and shimmering stage pictures. As ever, the choreographer’s sensitivity to the music is astonishing to behold. Indeed, it’s as if his fluid movements exist within the music, creating true poetry in motion.

BAAND TOGETHER DANCE FESTIVAL
Damrosch Park

One of the great successes of Covid-era performing arts programming was the formulation of last summer’s BAAND Together Festival, which was safely performed outdoors at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park. Happily, the crowd-pleasing festival has returned for an encore run this summer (RECOMMENDED), perhaps starting a new New York summer tradition. Synergistic and inspiring, the festival features five accomplished dance companies – Ballet Hispánico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem – performing together on a single stage. Like last year, this set up allows dance fans to appreciate the distinct differences in the choreographic vocabulary between these flagship New York dance companies. New to this year’s addition was the inclusion Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s celebratory “One for All”, a world premiere commission featuring dancers from each of the five aforementioned companies. If a surface-level quality pervades these programs (I attended two of five), so be it. These types of accessible “public service” programming are integral to attracting new audiences to the vibrant world of New York dance.