Dance Review: Alvin Ailey’s Ohad Naharin Premiere at City Center - Review
On Friday night at New York City Center Ailey fans had a chance to strut their stuff on stage — and how — in the company premiere of the Israeli choreographer <a href="http://www.buylouisvuittonoutletonlines.com"><strong>Loui s Vuitton Outlet</strong></a> Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16” (1999). A razzle-dazzle sampler piece based on excerpts from Mr. Naharin’s previous dances, it features an extended social-dance romp between the performers and the audience members they select on the spot. This can lead to terribly awkward encounters, but it didn’t with these guest dancers, many of whom upstaged their professional partners with their strutting, hamming and, in one memorable case, grabbing a rear end. Even without such, er, serendipitous interactions, “Minus 16” is a canny addition by Ailey’s artistic director, Robert Battle. A propulsive, voluptuous spectacle whose apparent differences from the repertory are merely superficial, it plays to the dancers’ skills and wows the audience without rocking any boats. Mr. Naharin often deals in emotional extremes and stylized violence. In the opening segment the dancers, in suits they will eventually rip from their bodies, sit on chairs arranged in a sweeping semicircle. They periodically rise, flinging their bodies back in dramatic arcs or chanting; one individual casts himself repeatedly to the floor. Another jackhammers up into the air, rigid. Everything is pushed, premeditated. There is barely space to breathe. The same is true in a different way of the silly “Revelations” <a href="http://www.louisvuittonoutletstoresonlines.com"><strong>L ouis Vuitton</strong></a> deluxe edition, with an expanded cast of 50, which ended Friday’s show. The program’s middle section, comprising new productions of “Streams” (1970) and “Journey” (1958), was perhaps meant to function as a breather between two juggernaut dances. But it was interminable. Alvin Ailey’s “Streams” is a continuous, pallid flow of abstract groupings, the leggings-and-unitard-clad dancers surging out along diagonals to Miloslav Kabelac’s crystalline “Eight Inventions” (Op. 45). Ailey’s language is rendered in thornier, more geometric tones than usual, but this shift comes across as a stylistic exercise more than a necessary means of saying something urgent or deeply felt. The emotions here are modern-dance boilerplate. Joyce Trisler’s “Journey” is a vehicle for a powerful female performer. Friday night it was Alicia Graf Mack. Wearing Malcolm McCormick’s flowing white shift and long-sleeved unitard, this lone woman responds to Charles Ives’s moody “Unanswered <a href="http://www.buylouisvuittonoutletonlines.com"><strong>Loui s Vuitton</strong></a> Question,” performed live. Three of the musicians sat on stage, but the trumpeter, Joshua Frank, stood in the first balcony, and his mournful, martial interjections came like slightly menacing warning shots. With her endless limbs and projection of grand yet internal drama, Ms. Graf Mack is glorious to behold. She deserves better material than this mannered and airless take on the mysterious quest, which doesn’t actually give her anywhere to go at all.
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