In the meantime, something else happened: the property, owned by the well-connected Related Companies, was included in the Hudson Yards tax incentive district approved earlier this week. But to qualify for the tax break, the company would have to build commercial instead of residential.

So would the tax breaks, along with the softening condo market, compel Related CEO Stephen Ross to build offices there instead?

We asked Ross's spokesman Howard Rubenstein. "Yes, he said he would consider commercial development depending on where the market is. He'll have to analyze it when the time comes. He hasn't made any decisions."

Taxes would be reduced by roughly 25 percent for the first 15 years after the building's completion and edge slowly up.

-Matthew Schuerman

CORRECTION: The original post erroneously said the tax breaks would not kick in until after a certain amount was built further west. In fact, the more that is built further west, the less the tax break would be.

Last night, Community Board 4 approved a letter to the Department of City Planning that recommended several changes to the city's zoning text regarding Theater Row, the area on 42nd Street between Ninth and 11th avenues.

The D.C.P. has been considering changes to "theater bonus" provisions in the area in part because of Related Companies' recent attempt to get a buildable-bulk bonus for constructing a 1,800-seat theater in a 60-story tower on 42nd Street at Dyer Avenue for Cirque de Soleil.

The D.C.P. invited the community to provide input on Feb. 8, 2006.

The zoning changes, whose "overarching purpose … is to ensure that the bonus is indeed an opportunity to facilitate small Off-Broadway theaters typical of Theater Row," are after the jump.

Community Board 4's Clinton Theater Floor Area Bonus (Zoning Resolution Section 96-25) Recommendations

The board's recommendations are strictly advisory, but Community Board 4 has a pretty knowledgeable land-use committee--as evidenced by its strong showing with the Hudson Yards rezoning. So expect the D.C.P. to take at least some of these suggestions to heart.

-Matthew Grace

- Riva Froymovich

Getting a spot in this coveted 9:15 class is harder than getting a reservation at Per Se. Luckily, I reserved mine at the end of the summer, when many of the core cultists were in Europe.

But now that I'm in the "It" class, I'm not sure I'm woman enough to take it. For the uninitiated: Core fusion combines the disciplines of Pilates, yoga and stretching, with the aim of creating long, lean muscles, a youthful body and mind-body relaxation. The class focuses on "the core," meaning abdominal muscles. The music varies from yogi atonal to pulsating, pelvic-busting rock. Usually some accessories are provided as well. A soft brown belt, for instance, is used to support certain stretches, although I've often thought I should just use it for self-flagellation when I can't do the exercises. Then there are the "playground balls," which sound like fun until you place them between your thighs and squeeze until your quivering quads beg for mercy.

I've spent months trying to pull up from my "core" (somewhere around the place where my morning muffin sits), and yes, it is a fabulous workout. My husband has lately been saying, "I can tell you've been going to core," which has really added some spice to our coital conversations and pretty much quelled his musings about applying for Wife Swap. But the problem is, I'm the kind of woman who is all too conscious of what other women are doing, thinking and wearing. And this particular group of hard-core core-ists brings out the worst of my insecurities, disrupting my inner well-being.

At the same time that I started to develop sexy "sit" bones, I also started to develop unrequited girl crushes and sophomoric envy of BBTM's (Better Bodies Than Mine). So many women are doing splits, it's like a middle-aged audition for The Nutcracker. I've realized this class is yet another venue where I have to wrestle with my ambivalent feelings towards other women. Like many predominantly female experiences in the city, the core-fusion class is an intoxicating fusion of nurturing and resentment.

The room is full of gals who've been twisting like pretzels for years, so stepping into this as a newcomer was more than a little intimidating. Because I danced years ago, I assumed I could breeze into the intermediate class and figure things out, but it proved hard to keep up. I've spent many demoralizing, yet inspiring classes behind post-menopausal women with glutes like chorus boys'. There's something so fabulous about a mature woman who wraps her spandex-sheathed legs around her neck and then goes home to make a brisket.

There's not a whole lot of room in this class-physical or psychic. Many of these women are former investment bankers or lawyers, and they bring their achievement-oriented personalities to exercise. One woman in class is so intense that she stakes out the same corner every time and talks only to a select few. One woman who regularly attends a later session confided that she doesn't like some of the people in the 9:15 class, or how crowded it gets. "I need my space," she said. On some days, it's so hard to get a spot at the barre, I'm left with two inches between me and two other Desperate Housewives types, extending my leg into somebody's face lift. And then there's the culture of the crowd. The Exhale ladies I've been (literally) hanging with are the same ones I encounter in my insular Upper East Side private-school world, where diversity means not owning a country house. While this cushy culture is comforting, it can also become stifling.

One day I decided to try to the basic, "easier" 12 o'clock class, partly because I wanted to see what it was like to go a little slower and also partly to see if the people were different. The women seemed more relaxed, less competitive and, well, friendlier. But soon after experiencing the more Zen-like atmosphere of the midday core group, I was back for my 9:15 fix. There was something just too decadent about taking a shower in the middle of the day and wandering around my apartment in a robe while other people are in business meetings.

I'm trying to see the group less as a clique, more as a sorority-in a good way. The women in the early class spend a lot of time giving each other advice, tips and all kinds of valuable information, as well as the occasional juicy gossip. I've been given the name of the ultimate hair relaxer and been invited to a private handbag sale. Some women have been fixed up by others in the class, and others take their core friends to Fairway for shopping runs. One morning, there was so much animated chatter among the mothers that the instructor asked some of them where they were going for coffee after class.

Rather than judge these ladies for being as obsessed over their abs as they are over their kids' school admissions, or envy them for being more flexible at 40 than I was when I was 10, I'm realizing that they're not so bad. Many even have a sense of humor, which really helps when you are in positions that rival those in the Cirque de Soleil. One core acquaintance joked about how she had to pop two Advils after every class just to control the pain, because if she didn't, she'd feel terrible and eat all day. "What would be the point of the class then?" she lamented.

Of course, there are still days when I have to tune out the annoying prattle about people's vacations in Casa de Campo or Deer Valley, or ignore the perfectly proportioned brunette in front of me who can balance on her butt for two minutes without breaking a sweat. I've heard there's another Manhattan branch of Exhale on Central Park South. According to spa lore, it attracts a more eclectic and diverse clientele. But I've never gone there. I'm way too lazy to travel that far to exercise.

Day One opened with a sentimental gesture: the last performance by artists from Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem before an enforced hiatus of six to nine months (for budgetary reasons). And the ballet was Balanchine’s masterpiece Agon, which originally featured Mitchell in the central male role. But there were more than sentimental reasons for welcoming this Agon. First of all, with one major exception it was danced with a lot more energy than we’ve been seeing at New York City Ballet. There may have been a little too much of the trademark D.T.H. "Here I am!" attitude, but the ballet came alive—it wasn’t solemn. Unfortunately, it was stopped dead in its tracks in the climactic pas de deux, in which the talented Tai Jimenez, who really doesn’t command the cool impassivity the role requires, was disastrously paired with Kip Sturm, an old hand who—there’s no polite way to put it—is simply past it, as well as being badly out of shape. And there went Agon. Still, it benefits greatly from being performed on the small stage of the City Center where it was first danced. It’s more compact, more compressed; the dancers are charged by being so close to each other; the mechanics of the ballet have more impact. Of course, Agon can survive any circumstance as long as it’s danced with conviction.

And then along came Bill (T. Jones) in his Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, with the late Zane’s 1978/1989 Continuous Replay. It’s based, we’re told, "on a sequence of 45 hand and arm gestures." Actually, it’s based on mass nudity (about which the audience was warned, proving that forewarned is not necessarily forearmed). A guy darts onstage and darts right off, but since he’s naked, the audience gasps and applauds. In a moment he’s back, demonstrating the first of those hand and arm gestures. Poor little guy (and I’m not referring to his equipment)—he has to pretend to be doing some significant with those arms while everybody’s staring at other parts of his anatomy. Soon the stage is filled with people rushing across it, all of them gesturing and all of them naked. Men, women; fat, thin; short, tall—it would have been funny if one of the naked ones hadn’t been a 5- or 6-year-old girl. Would you call this exploitation? Eventually—and predictably—the participants start getting dressed, until at the end only the first fellow remains in the altogether, still gesturing away. The whole thing makes you appreciate clothes. Standing ovation.

Streb? Six dancers, if that’s what they are, work a raised trampoline, flinging themselves recklessly downwards onto mats. It’s sort of exciting when they soar through the air, but the whole acrobatic exercise, called Wild Blue Yonder, belongs in Cirque du Soleil, not a "Fall for Dance Festival." A second piece, Ricochet, has the six flinging themselves over and over against a see-through plexiglass wall. (Bulletin: I just noticed in the program that this second piece actually was made for Cirque du Soleil.) Well, different strokes for different folks.

A brief, vaudevillish solo called Dose followed, choreographed and danced by David Neumann to a good Tom Waits song. Neumann, at least in this piece, has a little of the look of Jim Carrey, so I’m all for him, but this quick sample doesn’t tell us much about the scope or depth of his talent.

Whereas we know all about Merce Cunningham, who gave us his overfamiliar How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run, in which he and his longtime colleague David Vaughan read aloud little wry stories and anecdotes while eight of his dancers bop around. The ensemble wasn’t as winning as it usually is, but maybe if I hadn’t seen this piece so recently, I would’ve been more charmed.

Day Two: For openers, Martha Graham’s Embattled Garden, that brilliant sex comedy set in Eden with the amazing Noguchi set. The performance was a bit heavy. Virginie Mécène’s Eve appeared overwrought and tormented, as if she were auditioning for Graham’s Jocasta or Medea; the original Yuriko, back in 1958, was more contained (and more effective). David Zurak was a somewhat bland Adam, Christophe Jeannot was a lithe and seductive Stranger (a.k.a. Snake), and the towering Katherine Crockett, as Lilith, dominated the stage as she always does.

To clear the palate, a duet by Susan Marshall, The Kiss, in which Eileen Thomas and Mark DeChiazza hang from ropes attached to their waists while they embrace. It sounds hokey, but as they kiss and sway, sway and kiss, swim and tumble through the air, cling, separate and reunite, their desperate passion gets to you. The piece seems to be saying that sexual attraction can be so deep that it becomes painful; think of the tormented Paolo and Francesca. The dancers are beautiful—you can certainly imagine kissing them—and the intensity of the work seems justified.

The next offering, Pearsonwidrig’s Ordinary Festivals, is "a dance/theater piece for 300 oranges, 16 performers, and 2 knives," and it begins with two of the 16 catching oranges on the tips of their knives (except when they miss). The music is engaging Italian pop, and the whole thing appears to be about Italian waiters and waitresses amusing themselves with fruit. Oranges are rolled across the floor, thrown across the stage, tossed up in the air; people do somersaults on a carpet—everything was good-natured and harmless. But as is true of all novelty acts, a little of it goes a long way, and there was a lot if it.

The most stimulating part of the program came from the Rubberbandance Group—excerpts from a work called Elastic Perspectives. The choreographer is Victor Quijada, who’s also one of the five dancers, and he’s found a way to integrate the excitement and inventiveness of hip-hop into real modern dance. You know you’re onto something new when the first music you hear is from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, while three guys and two girls, in jeans and tank tops and sweatshirts, are making their fabulous hip-hop moves. By the time you get to the last "excerpt," set to the "Libiamo" duet from La Traviata, you’re convinced that this latest kind of social dancing can be absorbed profitably into the mainstream of dance, just like waltz and jazz and pop.

And then to wrap things up, a touch—a long touch—of flamenco. You’d have to know a lot more than I do about flamenco to gauge the authenticity the star of Noche Flamenca, dancer Soledad Barrio. She certainly has self-confidence—enough to perform a long solo, and then to perform another one, equally long. Though I can see how experienced and capable Barrio is, and how brilliant her footwork, I found her less than thrilling. Besides, she was wearing a plain black dress, and as a friend remarked, a flamenco dancer without a great dress is like The Nutcracker without a great tree.

How to convey the arid tedium of Trisha Brown’s Groove and Countermove, which opened the third evening? Brown is an icon, but this work from four years ago is empty, and endless. On and on it noodles, its nine not-very-interesting dancers sauntering about, sometimes erupting into agitations, then applying the brakes. I’d say that the empress has no clothes, except that the clothes were what I liked best, since they were in those chalky pastels I associate with Necco wafers. Remember Necco wafers? They gave me something positive to focus on while the rest of my brain was going dead.

When I saw Ballet Hispanico’s Dejame Soñar ( Let Me Dream) less than a year ago, it seemed harmlessly energetic and amusingly flamboyant in its celebration of the Puerto Rican immigrant experience. It’s got a story (young man leaves the island for the Big Apple, forgetting his local sweetheart while dancing up a storm in a New York bar). It’s got juice. But seeing it a second time is not a good idea.

I also found it hard to respond to Precious Cracked Earth, the work of the "Kathak dancer" Parul Shah. Three washerwomen along a riverbank "squat on their haunches, beating their wash and capturing fish with their hands." After a while, a man comes along, and there’s a happy encounter. The steps and tone are gentle and lulling, but as with flamenco, I’m so ignorant about Kathak dance that I can’t judge it.

Rennie Harris Puremovement gives us hip-hop plain and simple—no nonsense about absorbing it into modern dance. The young guys in Students of The Asphalt Jungle are out there hipping, hopping, spinning (often on their heads), gyrating, doing impossible things and then doing them again. They’re irresistible, though once you’ve seen someone spin on his head, you don’t really need to see him do it again. I don’t know how hip-hop can develop as an art form, but it definitely clears the air and leaves the audience wild with excitement.

I myself was more excited by the resurrection, by City Ballet’s Peter Boal, of Paul Taylor’s great solo from Balanchine’s Episodes. Taylor didn’t stick around for long after his guest appearances with City Ballet back in 1959, and Episodes was denied its solo until Peter Frame learned it many years later. Then it disappeared again. Boal’s daring and courage are all the more remarkable because he’s so dissimilar to Taylor: He’s a ballet dancer, not a modern dancer, and he can’t disguise it, whereas much of the impact Taylor made came from the shock of his anti-balleticness. And Taylor was a big bruiser of a guy, while Boal is slight—the insecty contortions the role demands look very different on this very different physique. But the differences, finally, don’t matter. Peter Boal is an artist, and he’s brought the Taylor solo back to life. We can only hope that City Ballet will welcome it back and make Episodes complete again.

So—is the festival, at least at the halfway point, a success? Yes, in that it’s brought thousands of people into the theater to see dance. Yes, in that it’s exposed us to a cross-section of what’s going on out there, even if a lot of what’s going on isn’t very good. Ballet takes a back seat; modern masters, acrobatics and ethnicities predominate. For the audience, it’s been a $10 whoopfest. Let’s see if all the enthusiasm carries over.

This may be because the ostensible plot (two Russian male dancers arrive in America in the 1920's, are on the run from thugs-who can tell why?-and hop into drag, whereupon one of them falls in love with a girl) is out of sync with whatever minimal feeling the ballet manages to project. This isn't the story of Alex and Max frustratedly panting after Sugar (I mean Lynn), but of Alex and Max panting after each other while having a great time swanning around in their skirts and blouses and wigs. Lynn is completely irrelevant-there's not a spark of erotic interest between her and Alex-but when Alex breaks the news to Max that he's going into the closet, it's oy vey time. (We can tell when Eifman's characters are suffering because that's when they arch their backs.)

Eifman is always happiest when he's displaying a bare male torso, and in Who's Who he gets to display two of them. I'd be happy for him (and for us) if he had come up with something interesting for his unwrapped boychiks to do, but all we get is homoerotic exhibitionism. Add to this the fact that most of his women are frighteningly thin and hard-some of them almost look like men in drag-and you're up against real gender confusion. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were two guys trapped in dresses and horny for you-know-who. The Alex and Max I saw were two narcissistic boys pretending to like girls while really enjoying being girls. You could say that the plot of Who's Who amounts to Boy Meets Boy, Boy Loses Boy, Boy Gets Girl.

There are critics who argue that Boris Eifman is "creative" and "inventive." This time round, his creativity consists of using jazz and swing music from the 20's onwards, plus a snatch of Rachmaninoff and even-we're spared nothing-Barber's Adagio for Strings . How to explain why a story set in the 20's should feature popular music from decades later? But it hardly matters, because Eifman, for all the research he claims to have done, hasn't the slightest understanding of American popular dance; he may be using Ellington and Strayhorn and Basie and Brubeck and Prima and Kenton, but the steps he has set to them are pastiche of pastiche of pastiche. Nor are his dancers, accustomed to delirious melodrama, comfortable with the Charleston and the chorus line-Lynn trying to tap is almost too painful to watch. On the other hand, when she laces on a pair of ballet slippers and darts around on pointe, as if she were a real classical ballerina, she's equally out of her depth. (For a while, she wears her pointe shoes on her hands -perhaps a first, and let's hope a last.)

Some questions:

Why does Who's Who begin with immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, with their tied-up parcels and their babushkas and their hokey yearning to be free, when the immigrant theme is more or less dropped? (Where's Eifman's dramaturge?)

Why is there a madcap Jewish wedding in Act II, complete with chuppah and yarmulkes, when the story has no Jewish elements? (Where's his rabbi?)

Why are Eifman's men either unmanned or brutal and his women either tormented or degraded? (Where's his analyst?)

Why do knowledgeable dance reviewers consistently praise this mishmash of misguided ambition and talentless posturing? (Where's their conscience?)

I do understand why Eifman ends with what he believes, in his delusion, to be a Balanchine finale (that's where the Rachmaninoff comes in): He sees himself as the Future, marrying Sovietski dance-drama with classical ballet. He's going to be the Balanchine of the 21st century-after all, they both come from St. Petersburg. But, alas, his one modest talent isn't for choreography, it's for special effects; they could use him at Cirque du Soleil. His dancers are flashy and without substance, his ideas are derivative and tawdry. Nevertheless, the City Center has made him an annual attraction, and his audience-largely composed of Russian émigrés-eats it up. How they ovate when he prances onstage for a curtain call sporting his cunning beard and cherubic smile! Stand by for next year.

That's fairly high praise, I know. But you will have a wonderful time at Villa Villa (which, roughly translated, means "by the seat of your pants"). I'll even guarantee it. Anyone who doesn't enjoy this show shall receive from me personally two complimentary tickets to Footloose . In Australia. One-way banana-boat fare not included.

There, nobody can say more than that. But the exciting experience of the De La Guarda troupe seems to bring out the best in everyone. Here's a friend of mine, who's seen the show three times, highly recommending it: "It's wild, it's short, there's nothing like it, and you get wet."

It is pretty wild, as performers slam-dancing in midair would strike you as wild. It's short-just 70 minutes without intermission. It's wet. The show sort of rains on everyone, encouraging deranged rain dances and wet kisses.

I seem to unknowingly inspire kisses at the theater. A Blue Man of Blue Man Group gave me a blue kiss. And one of the De La Guarda boys-the handsome one-danced up to me in the rain to give me a great big smackeroo on the mouth. It was nice.

You can always say No. And as for the rain: You can always stand on the outskirts of the action and not get wet. No one is threatened in any way; only reality is the victim.

As the program puts it with the imaginative authority of a manifesto worth listening to: "Everything started with the uncontrollable desire to explode, to expand, to choose a space and take complete hold of it, while leaving nothing out of the game. The tide produced by the audience is a fundamental part of the emotional upheaval of this show, where everything is fragile, everything is changeable except our tempests. The victim is reality. There are no laws of nature in what's fantastic; there is neither logic nor stability."

There is nothing like it. Some link the purely visceral impact of De La Guarda to the Off-Broadway sensation of nonverbal shows like Stomp and Blue Man Group. But they remain earthbound by comparison. To my surprise, De La Guarda has even been linked to Cirque du Soleil, which is grasping at spectacles. Cirque du Soleil has its charms, but it is arty where De La Guarda is unpretentiously liberated. No, the Argentine troupe has created something boldly new by breaking through all traditional barriers and liberating theater itself. They have made theater literally airborne.

So much so, it is said that De La Guarda isn't even theater. There will always be those who feel comfortable only with the safely bourgeois. And conventional theater is the norm. The show has no dialogue or plot. But then, nor is there any in the later plays of Samuel Beckett. There aren't any seats (and therefore there are no bad seats). But we tend to stand happily at rock concerts even when there are seats. Why quibble over mere definitions? Theater is-or ought to be-anything you want it to be.

Besides, the show clearly does have a theater pedigree, though it is the first I've known to combine the skills of rock climbers with ballet and street theater. The founders of De La Guarda began as drama school graduates in the mid-80's by joining an underground theater group in the wake of the "dirty war" of Argentina's right-wing military junta. In that revolutionary sense, their desire to explode and make new-to defeat reality-was political. In a more nostalgic sense, they coincidentally link to the 1960's theater "happenings" of the Living Theater and stoned disciples of Antonin Artaud. In fact, you could, if you wished, trace their use of moving platforms during the show directly to the pageants performed on the back of carts in the Middle Ages. So, yes, they belong to theater.

The show itself takes place in a big room-a perfect empty space-within an old savings bank on Union Square East. The space has been rebaptized the Daryl Roth Theater, with room for 500 spectators. That's the first major achievement of De La Guarda: They've brought life-a celebration of life-into a dead space. It clearly isn't a conventional theater, and therefore attracts a younger crowd who can't relate to theater as we-or our parents-know it.

Look what happens in the opening moments: We are standing under a paper ceiling, wondering what's going on, or going to happen. Though there are occasional dips in the performance, that sense of anticipation never leaves us. We never know what will happen next. Perhaps the paper ceiling is a sky in a surreal dream, pelted by raindrops like a tin roof. Or it's the surface of an ocean. Silhouettes, part human, part animal, seem to be scurrying and flying across the surface high above us. We're submerged in a shadowy firmament. Then without warning, a figure crashes through the sky to grab a woman in the audience and take her flying up to the heavens where she disappears. And the heavens open.

The woman is a plant, I realized later. But no matter at all. The nightmare image takes our breath away. The show, in David Richards' beautiful phrase, is all about "a pandemonium of flight." The troupe, attached to ropes and harnesses, chase one another across walls, or smash into them-splat!-like insects. They are meteors, skydivers, cannonballs, flashers. The men, with conscious, ironic conformity, wear business suits. But one is bare-assed, mooning us maniacally from on high. It's his appealing trademark.

The show is simultaneously fun and unsettling. It teases our perceptions. It appears to be unplanned, improvised, performed on the wing. There's a rhythmic hypnotic quality at work and at play.

The infectious free spirits are choreographed, the high energy on the spontaneous dangerous edge. The pounding percussion gives us its atmosphere of unearthly ritual, as if we're attending some semi-sacred ceremony for the deranged, or for all who wish to escape from mundane reality.

Call it bungee love, performance art, moving image, carnival, rave, mosh pit, dreamscape, aerial art, ritual theater or primal dance. Call it what you want. The wish to fly is an innocent dream, and De La Guarda makes our spirits soar.