Marking the Seasons

...On Dance MARKING THE SEASONS BY JENNIFER DUNNING The end of summer and beginning of the new dance year have come and gone with the 14th New York Dance Festival, held September 2-11 It is a traditional and fitting rite of passage Afternoons and evenings have generally grown a little cooler, and although people picnic next to Central Park's open-air Delacorte Theater, where the program is held as an adjunct to the New York Shakespeare Festival, they bring sweaters along with their pate Cold rains often fall mid-concert, too, indeed, some of the event's best moments have come when performers incorporated a downpour into their dance, as hundreds looked determinedly on with umbrellas raised overhead Those waiting on line for the distribution of free tickets are a glorious stew of familiar types gossiping dance fans, elderly aficionados who guard their places zealously, young families, students with splayed feet (causing the peculiar stork walk that identifies the dancer) and bursting dance bags The offerings they will see are equally varied and, in their own disorganized way, often carry a taste of what is lo come in the season proper Despite being initially produced by Rebekah Harkness, a patron of the arts known both for her generosity and for a kind of innocent vulgarity that has little to do with the proletariat, the festival has always had an air of earnest populism about it Few prestigious companies can appear because of the series' physical and financial limitations, some of the groups and individuals that do perform are unknown to all except the most compulsive dancegoer And because the program is selected by committee with the aim of representing every facet of the dance, the wildest assortment of styles is on view Although better produced than in the days when an evening could stray on until midnight, the festival still gives the impression of a free-for-all This is due in large measure to those Delacorte audiences Increasingly more informed about a far wider range of dance, they nevertheless remain vocal and will unhesitatingly express their opinions with a vigor that is just about unknown at City Center or the New York State Theater The bill of fare, with its obligatory nods to the ethnic and the venerable, contributes to the atmosphere too The first was embodied this year by Morocco (a predictably snake-hipped "Middle-Eastern Exotic Dancer"), the young Ballet Hispanico of New York and the exuberant, slyly amusing Charles Moore Dances and Drums of Africa, the second by veteran modern dance choreographers (Catherine Litz and May O'Donnell Middle-of-the-road small modern groups also continued to be well-represented The ballet pas de deux that used to pay obeissance to the establishment, however, were less in evidence in 1977 than ever before A total of 31 acts, including the Rockettes, were chosen to appear on five separate programs Some of the best of them were (intentionally) funny, that the humor was frequently expressed through movement, rather than mugging or clowning, seems to me to have been made possible by the growing sophistication among audiences Last year, in contrast, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, an all-male drag company, performed a grand duet from Swan Lake that met with bewilderment, plus some loud m-group laughter The Trocks are a phenomenon in themselves an ensemble of informed balletomanes, all amateur dancers, intent on satirizing ballet manners and trends They have the regrettable habit of playing up to the crowds, though Even this year, their spoof of Jerome Robbins' popular works set to piano pieces (seen during their spring engagement at the Palace as well) was pretty broad The posturing was unnecessary, for the often wickedly funny parodying of Robbins trademarks was as amusing as the sight of hairy-chested ballerinas On the quieter side, May O'Don-nell's beautifully crafted The Pursuit of Happiness, a new suite of dances set to big band music, was inspired by what we now recognize as the innocence of the 1930s and '40s She blended strains of period social dance with her own style, characterized by clear diagonals and clean turns and tails, to achieve a gently amused recreation ot a time Her effects depended neither on sight gags nor on recognizable usual emblems of the era, but on kinetic humor O'Don-nell, an active choreographer since the '40s, eminently deserves her renewed popularity Two aspects of the Delacorte programming have especially significant implications for the upcoming season One of them has to do with the unfortunate emergence of what one normally sympathetic administrator recently termed the "grant generation " As audiences grow more knowledgeable and urbane, a good deal of the dance being offered is becoming less so, this is in part attributable to the blossoming of a crop of choreographers and performers who, thanks to endowments and foundations, have been able to move on from the isolated lofts and other odd spaces where they started A case in point is one Michael Sullivan, although I don't know if he has ever been encouraged by a grant All I know about the young choreographer of I'm OK, You're *** is what the program says that he trained in London and has choreographed both there and in the U S (the copy does not state for whom), that his company was formed in October of last year, and that it "consists of four dancers who perform the work of Michael Sullivan " I suppose an early credit for Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham would not have read very differently, and we are certainly the benefactors of their first probings being allowed to develop Yet could their initial work have been so arrogantly insubstantial, so precariously chic, as Sullivan's effort'' I'm OK, You're ***, a definite product of the loft tradition, was a duet for men dressed in slouch caps, overalls and stretch tops Inexplicably, each had black streaks under his eyes, equally inexplicably, the work was set to the "Richard Wagner Funeral March for Siegfried " It ran for about 10 minutes but, as one observer wearily put it, made the Ring Cycle seem to end in a trice Beginning with a slow ballet barre, the two deadpan dancers continued through a round of Grahamesque contractions of the mid-torso, pushups and stiff-legged struts, looking at times like wind-up toys Sullivan threw in a dash of this and a pinch of that a little clownish partnering being as close as the dancers got to establishing any sort of contact True, the juxtaposition of gamin disaffectedness with Wagnerian grandeur was at first amusing, yet the piece was never more than the acting out of an idea set to music Nor was what we could see of the performers' technique anywhere near remarkable enough to save the day On a happier note, the festival continued to acknowledge a growing interest in the roots of American dance a trend that might gradually bring a new depth to the coldly technical performance concerns and ill-disciplined choreographic urele-vancies that characterize much of '70s dance One entry rich with history was the Joyce Trisler Danscompany's excerpts from The Spirit of Denishawn, its very popular compilation of works by modern dance pioneers Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn (see my "Duncan and Denishawn Revisited," NL, Jan 3) With the wind stirring the young dancers' chiffon tunics, and the magical darkness of Central Park's Belvedere Castle providing a dramatic backdrop in the distance, the unaffected simplicity of the pieces, even at their most kitschily exotic, came across with new freshness I was sadly unable to see a second bow to the pasta 15-minute stint by Howard "Sandman" Sims, one of the last of the fine old-time black tap dancers who have made an art form of the vernacular Hoofers like Sims seldom appear in New York, but sporadic national tours and their stubborn persistence should insure the survival of this precise and exhilarating form for at least as long as they can tap By including Sims in its program, the New York Dance Festival demonstrated its own continuing vitality...