He's really sweet. (YouTube)

Best part is, he's huge on Reddit. That's worth more than a job with health insurance any day!

Nite Moves (screengrab)

Nite Moves, a strip club in Albany, N.Y., deserves the same treatment as the New York City Ballet in the eyes of the tax man. That's the basic argument before New York's highest court right now. Nearly a half-million dollars are at stake if the establishment wins the case and achieves tax-exempt parity with other fine purveyors of the terpsichorean arts. Public Radio International's Studio 360 reports that the club has been victorious in the past:

The case has gone back and forth. Nite Moves won the first round of litigation in 2009, but an appellate court reversed that decision a year later.

At issue is whether exotic dancing falls into the legally defined category of "choreographed performance."

The Albany-area club, which serves neither food nor alcohol, claims that its cover charges and fees for private dances cannot be subject to sales tax simply because the dancers grind more than they jeté.

In court papers Nite Moves' Attorney Andrew McCullough has contended the state has often acted as "dance critic," even allowing amateur dance groups tax breaks on ticket sales. Mr. McCullough has also had an author of books on dance testify about the standard moves in pole-dancing as well as the fact that legendary choreographer Georges Balanchine would sometimes go to burlesque shows for inspiration.

The court is expected to issue a decision later in the Fall, and the ruling could ripple across the country, affecting similar cases in other jurisdictions.

It is less likely any legal legitimizing of exotic dance will end up with collaborations between establishments like Nite Moves and, say, the Metropolitan Opera, but we can dream.

Marcelo Gomes, Misty Copeland and Craig Salstein lift and tuck.

Walking past rows of conspicuous hood ornaments at the Chelsea Piers, The Observer could smell the party well before we could see it. A heady mixture of curry and truffles filled the parking lot as we trekked to Manhattan’s western extremity, the Lighthouse at Pier 61.

At the entrance to the American Ballet Theatre’s Culinary Pas de Deux, we were greeted by several young dancers in Renaissance peasant costumes. With deep curtsies, the ballerinas directed us inside.
The space had been converted into a veritable smorgasbord for the grand alimentary fete, with chefs from the city’s top restaurants churning out hundreds of mini dishes for the guests to enjoy. Serving stations, interspersed with well-stocked bars, became the sites of swirling feeding frenzies as attendees strove to get their fill.

Trying to balance the myriad plates without sullying their cocktail attire, guests juggled various cuisines, taste-testing the wide array of fodder. Curry carrot soup was followed by “Salmon Caviar” (roe, for the more literal minded) crêpes, then lobster and halibut ceviche. Carnivores indulged in pork and black truffle terrines, while the more Mediterranean-inclined sampled manti with yogurt foam.

Attendant waiters shuffled deftly around the room with massive trays, upon which guests placed stacks and stacks of discarded plastic plates. Having added our dinner detritus to one such pile, we set out to speak to some of the ABT patrons circulating the space.

Our company was split between longtime ABT loyalists, dancers and younger patrons of the arts. Bob Ginsberg fit comfortably in the first classification, having held a subscription to the ballet for 30 or 40 years, by his account. “I had absolutely no culture as a Jewish kid from the Bronx. Even though Jews are supposed to have culture, we didn’t,” he laughed. It was after law school that his aesthetic sensibilities matured. “I’ve subscribed every year,” he said proudly. Recently, Mr. Ginsberg has supplemented his refined artistic taste with a more off-color diversion: supporting the Occupy movement. “I’ve marched with them a couple of times,” he explained, admitting that he recently gave the group $20 as he passed their encampment. “Then I went back and I said, ‘I’m part of the 1 percent! But my money is just as good.’” He flashed a knowing grin.

We noticed a svelte female guest and, briefly glimpsing her allongé stance, decided that she must be a danseuse. The prima in question was in fact Iveta Lukosiute, world champion ballroom dancer. Ms. Lukosiute, however, is not unfamiliar with the world of pirouettes and arabesques. “I take ballet classes almost every day,” she told The Observer. “I’m not a ballet dancer,” she was quick to qualify, “but I take ballet classes. It helps a lot. Ballet is a good foundation for every style of dance,” she pronounced.

Alessandra Rotondi, a former ballerina turned wine consultant, took a more notional approach to the art form. “If you know what dancing means, you know how to live life. And even when you stop dancing you keep focusing on your ultimate goal. It’s like being in the army,” she assured us. Having ignominiously dropped out of ballet school after our sashays were consistently deemed sub par, we decided to take her word for it.

ABT dancers Marcelo Gomes, Misty Copeland and Craig Salstein emceed a spirited live auction, in which not one but two onstage appearances (one as a Capulet corpse, one as a fleeting pirate in Le Corsaire) were sold to balletomanes eager for their moment, however, brief in the spotlight.

The dynamic trio followed the auction with a brief comedic dance performance to “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (the Tony Bennett version, fortunately). With that particular paring of agility and strength achieved solely through ballet, Mr. Gomes and Mr. Salstein competed for Ms. Copeland’s affections, all the while executing complicated lifts and spins, to the audience’s delight.

Three sets of ABT dancers who had paired off in their personal lives came to the stage for a hammy version of “The Dating Game,” complete with Herb Alpert’s enduring classic, “Spanish Flea.” The couples answered prying questions related to their gastronomical tendencies (“What is the most annoying thing your date does while eating?”) and scribbled down their answers furiously.

After the game, The Observer spoke to one of couples. Dancers Cory Stearns and Gemma Bond had been dating for two years, and dutifully agreed to participate in ABT’s Dating Game when asked to contribute to the Pas de Deux. “It was an experiment, and I don’t think they’ll do it again next year,” Mr. Stearns said. “It was a little embarrassing,” he admitted.

As we left, Whitney Houston’s tune “I Want to Dance With Somebody” thundered throughout the room, as professionals and amateurs shared the stage, dancing like everybody was watching.
editorial@observer.com

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing "Biped" (1999). (Stephanie Berger/BAM)

This past week marked a unique circumstance in the history of dance in America—the first time I can think of when a major figure took a last (posthumous) bow and shut up shop. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave four performances at BAM, featuring six of Cunningham’s major works, and apart from several Events—pieces being performed simultaneously on three stages (the audience wanders from one to another for 45 minutes) later in the month at the Park Avenue Armory—it has only a two-week season in Paris remaining before it permanently disbands.

Mind you, this all comes at the end of a two-year farewell world tour in accordance with Cunningham’s plan, but it’s still a defining goodbye. The school will continue, and the works will be available to other companies to be staged by ex-Cunningham dancers, but a season of his work presented by a formal Cunningham company, like the one we’ve just experienced, is a thing of the past.

Ballet choreographers have it easier. The language of ballet is universal and can be handily transplanted—works by Balanchine, Ashton, Robbins, MacMillan are on view everywhere. Earlier masters have slowly gone out of fashion, but there are still Fokine and Lifar and Nijinska spottings—the Paris Opéra Ballet, for instance, continues to pretend that Lifar matters—and of course the 19th-century classics endure. But each modern master creates his or her own language, so that when he or she is gone, the work is dangerously vulnerable. Certain modern masters like Doris Humphrey have essentially vanished. The Martha Graham company keeps coming back to greater or lesser effect, but the repertory exists and the performance tradition exists—sort of. The José Limon company is still valid, with some of his repertory intact. Paul Taylor works are performed everywhere, though rarely as wonderfully as his own company performs them; they’re not an endangered species, and—thank God—Mr. Taylor is still here to protect them and add to them, and to arrange a sensible future for them. But what will happen to the Cunningham rep? And does it matter?

There are many people for whom it matters more than anything else, who see him as the overwhelming dance genius of our time. (It’s the way I see Balanchine.) I’ve always been ambivalent about him. The absolute mastery is always evident—no one understands movement better than he does, and if he’s ever had a foolish or vulgar moment, I’ve missed it; there’s clearly meaning behind everything he’s ever done. And of course he was a great dancer—one of America’s greatest. For me, though, the disconnect between dance and music as well as between dance and narrative too often leaves me floundering, unsure of what I’m seeing when I see movement bare. I feel fortunate that in these final few days at BAM I was able to respond so positively to so much—for me, a last moment reprieve, even though for the company it was only a stay of execution.

There were three programs. My heart sank with the first, an hour-long work from 1983 called Roaratorio with a challenging score by John Cage that announces itself as “An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake.” It’s a tumult of sounds, from the roar of trains and the cries of babies to animal noises and weather effects, plus Cage himself reading aloud the 2,462 place names to be found in Joyce’s novel, most of them unintelligible as they come pounding at the audience from the surround-sound system. I don’t  appreciate Irish jiggy or folky inflected dance, I don’t get Finnegans Wake, and I dislike the circus, so there were three strikes against me from the start.

Second Hand put me on the right path. It was originally meant to be danced to Satie’s Socrate, but a Cage score was substituted when the Satie estate denied Cunningham permission. The dance, nevertheless, reflects the life—and particularly the death—of Socrates. As he prepares to die, Socrates (originally danced by Cunningham himself, now by Robert Swinston) stands away from his disciples as he accepts, even welcomes, his fate. I also feel reverberations of The Tempest, with Cunningham as Prospero dismissing all those human spirits whom he has conjured up. I suspect that he was never really interested in people except as the equipment he needed to create movement. In that sense, he would not have been interested in dancers per se, unlike a Balanchine or Ashton (or Taylor or Tharp or Morris), for whom identifying, exploring and revealing individual dancers was of consummate interest. (Graham was first and foremost concerned with creating works which she herself could dance.)

Earlier in Cunningham’s career he associated himself with major contemporary artists—Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol—to provide the visual counterpart to his dances. By the end of the last century he had engaged with computer art, and was committed to a kind of randomness—he was now at a further remove from collaboration with other artists, especially when in 1992 Cage, his lifelong partner, died. Yet for me, his BIPED, created in 1999, is his most beautiful and moving work. (He was approaching 80 when he made it.) Again and again the 13 dancers invade the stage and recede from it, alone or in what appear to be inevitable groupings. Their glistening costumes, the remarkable shifting lighting and the inspired projections of moving digital images that flash upon a scrim at the front of the stage give the entire work a cohesion that I don’t find in much of Cunningham. Most importantly, the pulsing score by Gavin Bryars supports and reinforces the rush of the dance. The ending is a dying fall—the fulfillment of a long and rich philosopher’s life.

The third of the BAM programs began with two well-known works, Pond Way (Brian Eno; Roy Lichtenstein) and RainForest (David Tudor and Warhol­—his famous silver helium balloons that occasionally float out over the audience). The first is calm, reflective, at times as if underwater—floating, diving and surfacing. The second is certainly grounded—as its title suggests, almost jungly in its feel; there are even ape-inflected moments. But whatever the basic metaphor in a Cunningham piece, the subject is always the same: basic dance movement. The long balance, the leg thrust outward, the tilt, the leap forward with one arm outstretched—and the way these dance phrases accumulate into something meaningful without benefit of music or narrative but instead by the way one dancer or group of dancers echoes or contrasts with another.

The final work at BAM, and the last intact piece we will have seen from the Cunningham Company, was Split Sides, from 2003, in which the decision as to which half of the piece, with which piece of music (Radiohead, Sigur Rós), which décor (Robert Heishman, Catherine Yass), which set of costumes (black-and-white, color; James Hall), and which lighting design (James F. Ingalls) will be used is made by rolling a die. This is a highly energized work, full of invention, and yet, as happens so often in Cunningham, punctuated by deep stillnesses. Its high point—the high point of the entire season—was a solo by a young dancer named Silas Riener, a solo so explosive, so risky, so convoluted, so thrilling that the entire theater burst into applause and gasps. Mr. Riener seems to move in many different directions at once, getting into and holding impossible balances while twisting his torso into impossible convolutions—yet everything composed and non-showoffy. No one can dance this way. How did Merce Cunningham know that someone could?

The company as a whole works superbly together, and it’s the nature of Cunningham’s procedure that everyone has much to do. The dancers call attention to the work rather than to themselves (the Riener solo is an exception). Robert Swinston, the senior dancer and director of choreography, has the impossible task of assuming Cunningham’s roles, and handles himself tactfully and with honor. (Being a generation or more older than the rest of the company, he looks less comfortable mixed in with the crowd.) But after this month it will all be history anyway. There are ample records of the dances and the dancers; of the way things were and have been for 60 years. But the experience itself is behind us.

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Work by L’A./Rachid Ouramdane.

In the mid-’90s, Arlene Croce brought down the wrath of the P.C. gods on herself when she refused to review a Bill T. Jones work called Still/Here on the grounds that it was victim art, and that “by working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism.” Today, long after the fuss has died down, the lesson is worth remembering. When confronted with AIDS, torture, the Holocaust, we can’t (and shouldn’t) turn off our human reactions, which means, however, that to a certain extent we have to turn off our critical faculties.

This past week at New York Live Arts (formally Dance Theater Workshop, or D.T.W., by which unpretentious name it was happily known for decades), we were offered two works by the much-acclaimed company L’A./Rachid Ouramdane. It was the first of these—Ordinary Witnesses—that was the big deal, an hour-long evocation of, or testimony to, victims of torture in Rwanda, Argentina, Palestine, etc.

The stage is dark. Three women and two men walk around haphazardly, very slowly. Over a loudspeaker comes a quiet videotaped voice, then another, then another, all speaking French, while their words are displayed on blurred, almost illegible supertitles upstage center. But even if you can’t follow the text you know what it’s about—words like “roadblock,” “machete,” “forgetting” penetrate your consciousness. This goes on for more than 10 minutes, and if you don’t know exactly what the witnesses are bearing witness to, it’s numbingly boring—but we mustn’t complain, because being tortured is far worse. And, to be fair, what’s going on isn’t as slow and solemn as the slow-champions of the world, Eiko and Koma, who always leave me longing for the Ritz Brothers.

But when the lights eventually come up (minimally) and the performers come into focus, something strong and impressive begins to happen—not because of the torture connection, which is never literalized, but because Rachid Ouramdane, the Algerian-French founder/choreographer of the group, commands an original and effective vocabulary. Yes, the collapses to the floor and the extreme and violent angles into which the dancers’ bodies contort may be the result of what they’ve suffered at the hands of their persecutors; but they may not be. What matters is that they grab your attention. And the central passage of the work—when like a whirling Dervish, with brilliantly speedy and controlled footwork, Lora Juodkaite spins and spins, on and on, then on and on yet longer, her red hair swirling out around her—is an amazement.

Finally, Ordinary Witnesses doesn’t come across as victim art because we don’t come away from it feeling manipulated or exploited; rather, it’s an example of what we call concept dance. And in the light of its extraordinary effects, we can forgive it even that.

A second program presented Mr. Ouramdane himself, solo, in his World Fair. It begins with him, head shaved, dressed in black, standing on a revolving stool. Eventually he removes his shirt, revealing chest hair; later he will put on a black tank top and change his shoes. At one point he applies white makeup to his face; further along, he wipes it off. Around the stage are placed a number of items—a record player, a piano, a synthesizer, amps and a gigantic metal pole that not only revolves relentlessly but dips up and down while shedding light from a lamp at one end.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ouramdane’s musical partner, Jean-Baptiste Julien, manipulates and/or plays his own score on various instruments, climaxing in thunderous, overexcited chordal piano. Throughout, Mr. Ouramdane is walking around the stage, sometimes stopping to throw himself to the ground or to lie flat on his back. Frequently, his arms fling themselves out to the side or up above his head—it’s dance as semaphore, a trope that clearly holds more significance for him than it does for us. One comes away from World Fair with an impression of high earnestness and harmless self-delusion. I’m still wondering, though, what the title means.

The somewhat controversial choreographer Liz Gerring brought her six dancers to the Baryshnikov Arts Center with a new hour-long work called She Dreams in Code. It’s multimedia, which means there’s a stream of video projections against the back of the stage (formless at times, sometimes jungly, sometimes rainy, all too often distracting the viewer’s eye from the dancers). There are occasional passages of voice-over narrative, presumably spoken by Mr. Gerring herself, relating her dreams. “It was a sunny afternoon …. I was driving down a two-lane road ….” There’s insistent music and/or sound by Michael J. Schumacher, good for the dancers to move to but not so good to listen to.

And, fortunately, there are the dancers themselves—three men, three women—all of them strong, fluent, disciplined. They’re crashing, hands flat, to the floor and springing up again. They swivel on one hand. They’re splitting into couples, but not always the same couples. They’re hopping or leaping on all fours, like orangutans, or frogs. The overall abstraction descends from Cunningham, and the walking, running, jogging from the early post-modernists. Everything is controlled and intelligent, if not always exciting. Gerring achieves a kind of clinical spontaneity that’s not negligible, but how fondly I look back on the days of monomedia.

One of America’s more respected dance companies, the Houston Ballet turned up at the Joyce last week—alas, with a pointless and unsatisfying repertory. It had been awarded the first grant to be given by the Nureyev Foundation to commission a new ballet, and it made the cuckoo decision to choose Jorma Elo, the Finnish choreographer as atrocious as he is omnipresent. Mr. Elo is based now with the Boston Ballet, but he’s making ballets everywhere. Who can remember their names? Who can distinguish one from another? Who ever brings them back for a second season? Has any respectable critic ever said anything positive about any of them?

Mr. Elo’s stock in trade is relentless assertive activity—slash and burn. To score easy audience points, he distorts and cutifies ballet vocabulary, both exploiting and perverting classicism. This particular piece, ONE/end/ONE (don’t ask), is big on upside-downism. (Those poor dancers!) On top of the rest, he is astoundingly unmusical. This time round, Mozart’s the victim (the Fourth Violin Concerto), but it could have been anyone: In an Elo ballet, connection between music and movement is at best accidental. (Ballets by Stanton Welch, the company’s artistic director, are very much in the Elo vein.)

ONE/end/ONE was preceded by a stale work of Jiří Kylián’s called Falling Angels, in which eight young women in black-jersey tank tops humped and lunged in unison across the stage, now belly to the floor, now on their knees, frequently leaning ardently forward with aspiration. It all made me think of Mary Wigman, the Queen of German Expressionist modern dance—the European Martha Graham. (If only!) This was synchronized boredom, proving yet again that there’s a crucial difference between the hypnotic and the soporific.

Last on the program was a mildly amusing piece called Hush by the British choreographer Christopher Bruce. Half a dozen clowns—more white face—are at some undefined gathering, resting and breaking out into individual bursts of dance. The music is an eccentric mélange assembled by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma that includes versions of the “Flight of the Bumble Bee” and the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria.” (It sounds worse than it is.) It ends with a welcome bang: a lively hoedown, all fiddles and twang.

None of Hush makes sense or has anything to say, but what a relief after Messrs. Kylián and Elo! Time after time, ballet companies from out of town, even good ones, wheel into the Joyce with programs that anyone could have told them wouldn’t go down well in New York. Poor Houston. Poor us.

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Sterling Hyltin and Andrew Veyette in "Rubies" from Jewels. (Photo: Paul Kolnik)

Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet’s ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at. It’s unfortunate that this became possible only when the financially floundering City Opera was forced to decamp from the David H. Koch Theater. (To be fair, this is one thing we can’t blame on David H. Koch and his politics.) But at least the opera’s loss is dance’s gain.

It seems as if the box office results have justified the change—there were well-stuffed houses at most of the performances I attended—although attendance was undoubtedly enhanced by all the hype for the Paul McCartney/Peter Martins debacle, Ocean’s Kingdom, with the nonfail Swan Lake (also Martins) to further pack them in. Good marketing, bad ballet.

But there were artistic gains to offset the deplorable gimmickry of Ocean’s Kingdom. The company as a whole is looking strong. With most of the dead wood of recent years given their obligatory farewell galas and gone with the wind, the younger stars are stepping up to the important roles and frequently making strong impressions.

The single best performance I witnessed was Sterling Hyltin’s in the “Rubies” section of Jewels. Ms. Hyltin is an odd one. Although she has a perfect small-scale body, a large-scale technique and unaffected charm, and has been given many opportunities, she’s never really claimed a significant part of the repertory. So her triumph in “Rubies” is particularly gratifying. Ms. Hyltin’s quicksilver, fearless attack is right for Stravinsky—she’s already been effective in Stravinsky Violin Concerto and Jeu de cartes— and she’s even improved as Terpsichore in Stravinsky’s Apollo, a role she lacks the essential amplitude for, as she does for Swan Lake. Her current performance in “Rubies,” with its blend of delicacy and brio, is just about the most effective since the great original, Patricia McBride.

Andrew Veyette—along with Robert Fairchild one of the company’s two most talented young male stars—made his “Rubies” debut opposite her, and the combination worked. He still has to lay on some extra macho swagger, but all the elements are there, and the two of them grasp that “Rubies” is a ballet about the two of them in their gleeful competition and complicity. Meanwhile, the towering Teresa Reichlen, as the biggest ruby of them all, dominates the scene without hogging it—it’s her best role, and she’s stunning in it, not only a sight for disbelieving eyes but a technical marvel: she sails through the three often-fatal arabesques penchées without even noticing that they’re impossible. To see a “Rubies” so close in spirit and execution to what Balanchine intended was badly needed balm.

“Emeralds,” that exquisite essence of French glamour and piquancy, had its ups and downs. Abi Stafford, for once, was relaxed and imaginative in the great Violette Verdy role; Ashley Bouder was faithful to it, but she’s an impulsive dancer, not a languorous one. Jenifer Ringer was stiff and brittle as the second ballerina, though slightly less so in her second performance, but I’m afraid she now detracts from the famous “Emeralds” perfume.

As for the climactic “Diamonds,” Wendy Whelan is past it (not that she ever was it). Maria Kowroski has somehow channeled Suzanne Farrell in this role, though she lacks Ms. Farrell’s technical strength and imagination. (Who doesn’t?) What Ms. Kowroski is is beautiful, in the Farrell manner and with the Farrell grandeur. Everybody’s favorite, Sara Mearns, is lovely at every moment, with her gorgeous back and her creamy movement. (From the start, “creamy” has been the critics’ adjective of choice to describe her.) Her dancing is so full-out, so engaged, that she’s irresistible, yet I still don’t find her definitive in many roles. “Diamonds” was one of our last chances to applaud Charles Askegard, who retired on the final day of the season. To the end he was a generous and super-adroit partner, always giving everything he had. His technique had begun to erode, but never his commitment. And he could be funny and sly—as he was in the Peter Martins sailor role in Union Jack. Best of all, at least for a number of the ballerinas, he was tall! Mr. Askegard is one of old-timers we’ll miss.

Another debut: Robert Fairchild in Apollo. When it was over, I could only think, “What a nice guy!” But Apollo isn’t a nice guy, he’s a god coming into his own. With nice girl Hyltin opposite him as Terpsichore, it was a little like watching two adorable kids at the junior hop. But Mr. Fairchild has all the equipment (even if he isn’t a natural Apollo like Chase Finlay), and he will ripen in the role just as Balanchine’s Apollo is meant to ripen. Best by far in the cast was Tiler Peck as Polyhymnia, but whenever she’s on stage she’s almost invariably the best. She can do everything, and with a deeper musicality than any of the other City Ballet women. She almost succeeded in making Christopher Wheeldon’s programmatic Mercurial Manoeuvres—and its unyielding Shostakovich score—seem appealing. Why the company doesn’t exploit her talents more fully is one of the mysteries.

Other young dancers are proving what an amazing job the School of American Ballet is doing in providing the company with waves of fresh talent. The unfolding drama of New York City Ballet continues. The new dancers are on the whole more technically polished and secure than those of the past, even if they generally have less dance expressivity. This is also true, of course, of movie stars, musical-comedy stars, opera stars: the great ones of the past were bigger than life. (Ms. Farrell was the last.) Today, we settle for—we seem to prefer—lifelike.

In the past several weeks two old-timers of the modern dance world have been showing off their wares. Both Bill T. Jones and Garth Fagan have had big Broadway triumphs—Fela! for Mr. Jones, The Lion King for Mr. Fagan. Both companies draw strength from their veteran dancers. And neither choreographer works on the highest level. But there the resemblances stop. Mr. Jones has courted, or at least welcomed, notoriety and hype—he’s unmistakably ambitious; Mr. Fagan just seems to go about his business, making dances, touring and turning up at the Joyce every couple of years.

Mr. Jones has been the pretentious one, but he seems to have calmed down. His recent season was dominated by rather bland duets, which all too frequently add up to athletic doodling. Moments of stillness are inevitably interrupted by eruptions of movement. There’s synchronized jumping, there’s slo-mo, there’s gasping and grunting. The best of the pieces on show was Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction), whatever that means, which Mr. Jones made with his late partner, Arnie Zanes, more than 30 years ago. Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent are an earnest young couple who walk a lot, run around a lot, fight, spoon and bat single words back and forth: “Milk,” “Cow,” “Farm.” They’re very touching and convincing, helped by being dressed in the casual elegance that Liz Prince’s costumes always provide.

Mr. Jones also revived Continuous Replay, which he made with Mr. Zanes in 1977. This is the one in which the whole company turns up nude, a fairly depressing sight. Gradually they get dressed, proving yet again that dancers look better with their clothes on.

Mr. Fagan’s work is wholly admirable if not wholly interesting. His strongest point is his company—these are uniformly energized and exciting dancers. Most amazing is Norwood Pennewell, who’s worked with Mr. Fagan since 1978 and is as assured, relaxed and commanding as he’s always been. How does he do it? Tall, long limbed, with a becoming little mustache, he’s a paragon, reigning over his flock through his inborn authority—an example to us all. His is a natural Apollonian presence, whereas the new male star, the Haitian Vitolio Jeune, is Dionysian to the max. He’s shorter, compacter, and explosive. He just can’t help coiling a little tighter, jumping a little higher, staying aloft a little longer. Mr. Pennewell is a cool cat, Mr. Jeune is a hot cat. And a star presence—he’s even appeared on So You Think You Can Dance. The women are terrific, too—especially the contained but deeply expressive Nicolette Depass, who’s been around only since the mid-’90s.

Mr. Fagan’s new piece, Madiba, is an abstract celebration or meditation on Nelson Mandela. To not much purpose: It’s sincere, but that’s not enough. (Mr. Pennewell has a new piece, too—Liminal Flux—very much in the Fagan tradition.) Most of the music Mr. Fagan favors is of the portentous-jazz variety (Madiba is danced to Abdullah Ibrahim). His choreography isn’t very memorable, but that’s O.K.—it isn’t concepty, it isn’t vulgar, and it shows off his admirable and exhilarating dancers.

editorial@observer.com

"Ocean's Kingdom."

The cows in Stella Gibbons’s immortal Cold Comfort Farm are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on Ocean’s Kingdom, the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney. (Sorry—Sir Paul McCartney; no P.R. release or press mention omits the knighthood.) If only Gibbons had given us a fifth cow: Endless.

The main problem isn’t Mr. McCartney’s music, which is generic, good-natured, old-fashioned pastiche, with no particular vocabulary of its own, no structural sophistication and no sign of the remarkable gift for melody he demonstrated in his Beatles days. But it’s not a disgrace to the neighbors. I can’t imagine anyone choosing to choreograph it if it weren’t by a hugely famous figure, yet who can blame Mr. McCartney for aspiring to the classical? He’s earned the right to try, and he’s been touchingly modest about it.

But whereas he may be grateful to City Ballet for giving him this chance, it’s hard to see Peter Martins as anything but opportunistic in giving it to him. And Mr. Martins has been duly penalized: the McCartney score and libretto have led him to one of the weakest choreographic performances of his long career. He can be so much better than this that I can only assume he was depressed by having to deal with music clearly uncongenial to his talents, and a particularly vapid and clichéd libretto. Mr. Martins used to be good at telling a story through dance. This story is so poorly, so confusingly, told that you can’t follow it without the printed synopsis.

There’s an underwater princess (Sara Mearns) and a terrestrial prince (Robert Fairchild) who meet beneath the waves, without benefit of aqualungs, and—just like Romeo and Juliet—they’re off and swimming. Well, no—there’s no simulated swimming in Ocean’s Kingdom, just endless vamping. The lovebirds (lovefish?) engage in four more or less identical love duets—posturings, swoony lifts, facial ecstasy—without a single original moment. Talk of generic! And talking of generic, what about the poor corps, who either wander around the rim of the action, pretending to be interested, or are running on and off the stage, pretending to be part of the plot?

Prince Stone’s wicked brother, King Terra (Amar Ramasar), wants Honorata for himself, abetted by the wicked (until she mysteriously turns good) Scala. In the second scene everyone goes topside for a divertissement of no freshness or excitement—even the usually irrepressible Daniel Ulbricht is somewhat muted in his standard routine of jumps and splits. The humor element: three Drunken Lords. Terra abducts and imprisons Honorata; Scala (the highly charged Georgina Pazcoguin, the only dancer who comes off well in this farrago) rescues her from her prison (cleverly suggested by columns of white light); a quick combat, and the baddies are defeated, the lovers reunited. Scala, according to the synopsis, has been killed holding off the baddies, but I missed it (I must have blinked). A big moon rises in the final scene. That’s it. Oh, yes—there are the costumes, by Sir Paul’s daughter, Stella, the highly successful fashioner designer. Alas, no one has explained to her that fashion is different from ballet—her costumes are particularly destructive to a dancer’s line, and generally klutzy. Hint: horizontal stripes aren’t usually flattering.

Ocean’s Kingdom is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance—it’s not about anything except its water-logged plot. And there’s absolutely no characterization, except for what Ms. Pazcoguin brings on her own to Scala. The superb Sara Mearns has nowhere to put her all-out expressivity; instead, her hair swirls, her dress swirls, she herself is swirled. Good-natured Robert Fairchild, the swirler, is essentially a prop. As for the Water Maidens, the Handmaidens, the Terra Punks and the Courtiers, like everyone else, they’re utterly at sea.

You have to feel sorry for City Ballet: every one of its recent gimmicks—the drab new version of The Seven Deadly Sins, featuring the miscast and floundering Patti Lupone; the multiballet collaboration with the celebrated architect Santiago Calatrava, whose neophyte stage work mostly undercut rather than enhanced the poor choreographers he was supposedly working for; the empty, vulgar double-bill from Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman—has been an artistic mess. The telling thing about all these expensive fiascoes is not that they failed, but that Mr. Martins has dragged in ballet outsiders to score publicity coups and stimulate sales. But, hardly surprising, these naïve and exploited amateurs haven’t known what they were doing. And the audience catches on. There may have been an ovation at the Martins-McCartney gala premiere, but at the other performances to date, the applause has been polite and pro forma; it was Balanchine’s amazing Union Jack that got people excited.

The company’s only keeper from the past few years has been Alexei Ratmansky’s ingenious—and semimarine—Namouna (he managed to duck the Calatrava décor). And the most brilliant and successful City Ballet performances over this season and the last have been the Balanchine abstract “black-and-white” programs: Episodes, Apollo, The Four Temperaments, Agon etc. Broadway stars, fashionable architects, titans of pop turn out to be no substitute for the real thing.

As it happens, the first dance review I wrote for this paper, a dozen years ago, was of the premiere of Peter Martins’s full-evening Swan Lake. It returns regularly, and the audience returns for it. (Swan Lake is invariably a hit; that’s why Balanchine made his one-act version back in 1951.) It’s not an easy ballet to get right—the text is a scramble, and the story lends itself to every kind of misinterpretation and overinterpretation. Yet there it is—the quintessential ballet; you can’t get away from it.

The score, of course, is a glory, and sounding better than ever at the Koch/State Theater since the acoustics have been so vastly improved. (The orchestra was at its best under A.B.T.’s David LaMarche; the company’s musical director, Fayçal Karoui, seems impatient with Tchaikovsky’s high Romanticism.) But by emphasizing the emotional impact of the score, the improved sound only underlines the fatal absence of feeling in the Martins version. He establishes no romantic connection between Odette and Prince Siegfried; there’s no pathos, no high drama, no tragedy, no grandeur. It’s all efficiency and vacuity. Worst is the first act, Siegfried’s supposed birthday celebration: hideous to look at—a pale-vomit Danish-Expressionist set, with streaks, and bilious Day-Glo costumes. It’s all so boring—the interminable corps work; the gratuitous intrusion of adorable children; our attention centered on the maddeningly relentless jack-in-the-box Jester rather than the Prince.

There’s no sense of Siegfried’s restlessness to justify the lure of the Swan music. There’s no profound meeting of souls at the lake when Prince encounters Swan, and no tragic threat to their love, only a ludicrous Von Rotbart getting in the way. The black act is conventional, with a botched climax. Only in the short, final scene does Mr. Martins make something happen—the fluidity of the swan choreography, the heightened feeling of the pas d’action among the principals and the corps are the best things in the ballet, spoiled by the ridiculous antics of the orange-caped Von Rotbart, who disappears in a puddle and creeps offstage, hoping he won’t be seen by the audience. His defeat, though, doesn’t lead to transfiguration. Never mind—the audience thinks it has seen Swan Lake.

This time around I took in two casts. Ashley Bouder’s Odette wasn’t plangent or tragic; instead, she was super-agitated—a very upset bird. Ms. Bouder is many wonderful things, but lyrical isn’t one of them. Her Odile, though, was compelling. She has the speed, the attack, the brilliance, the command. She nailed the notorious fouettés. And in the final scene she found some moving stillness in the midst of all the frenzy.

Ms. Bouder’s compactness is in almost demented contrast to Teresa Reichlen’s great height and hyperextended legs and arms. Ms. Reichlen is cool in contrast to Ms. Bouder’s heat, and although she showed no feeling in the first lake scene, she dominated it. As Odile she’s a nonstarter: She’s a deliberate dancer, without fire or glitter. She’s technically strong, though, and she made it through the fouettés even if they had a tendency to wander.

Did either ballerina animate the Martins ice swan? No, but I’m not sure Pavlova or Fonteyn could have manage to either. As usual, Swan Lake drew crowds, who applauded absolutely everything with equal enthusiasm—except the first entrances of the principal performers. This apparent lack of familiarity with the most famous of all ballets is a bad omen. City Ballet could once count on a discerning and committed congregation to keep it honest. To be fair, though, they did prefer Union Jack to Ocean’s Kingdom.

editorial@observer.com

When Roberta Flack arrived in a shimmery black ensemble and big orange curls, she was immediately swarmed by an adoring entourage. Ms. Flack said she wasn’t expecting the award, but was keenly aware of the Venn diagram overlap of her work and Broadway. “Dance and singing are the two art forms that keep Broadway runnin’, you know? Some things just go together. Like pound cake and ice cream. Rice and gravy. Chicken and potato salad.”

Introducing Roberta Flack on stage was Adriane Lenox, Broadway actress and Flack’s personal friend, who made a crack at her own age. “Back in the last millennium, I had a scholarship. And that was very helpful to me. We should all be proud that tonight, we are collectively paying forward to the education of the next generation of artists.”

After the performances, the VIP guests made their way to the penthouse, where a view of the Empire State Building and 5^th Avenue, alongside delicious finger foods, greeted them.

While we circled the man responsible for the evening’s talent, the famed dance teacher and executive director of NYCDA Joe Lanteri, we noticed Miss New York standing in her full regalia and speaking to doting fans about the responsibilities of wearing the crown. “I slept with it right by my bed and just woke up in the morning and put it on.”

Socialite photographer Rose Hartman rushed over to snap a picture of the beauty queen, but not before asking her to hide her liquor. “Would you not have a drink in your hand,” she cooed. “Was your mother thrilled? Did she take you out for a little pasta?”

The Observer chatted with celebrity blogger Tia Walker and wondered if she knew any of the Broadway stars. “There’s one guy. He’s really good-looking, he’s got dark hair. He came up and introduced himself. I forgot his name.”

Jeremiah James?

“That’s him! I don’t know where he went, but he’s really cute!”

We mingled with the cast of In the Heights and asked Lin-Manuel Miranda about his myriad of new projects, including a musical based on the Bring It On franchise, an Adult Swim pilot about his rap troupe Freestyle Love Supreme, and a movie version of In the Heights, to begin production next summer.

And as if his workload wasn’t enough, Miranda is currently working with Tommy Kail on a new musical adaption of a book, but would not provide details.

“I’m not gonna tell you. It’s not ready for that,” Miranda grinned. But he did admit he’s been spending a lot of time with Mr. Kail. “I talk to Tommy more than I talk to my parents! But we’re working!”

Also working was Mr. Lanteri, who remained invisible behind a wall of admirers. As the room emptied out, he was still blowing kisses goodbye and promising, “We’ll talk! I’ll call you!”

Dancers Perform On Vanishing by Jonah Bokaer

At the Guggenheim's rotunda on Thursday evening, five dancers, accompanied by John Cage’s solo cello piece One⁸, performed On Vanishing, a new work by the young New York-based choreographer Jonah Bokaer that the museum had commissioned in conjunction with its current exhibition, Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity.

Audience members, including Mr. Bokaer's mother, leaned against the museum's low, spiraling railings, and watched the action unfold on the marble floor below, where three person-sized sheets of white paper sat next to a Lee Ufan sculpture called Dialogue, which consisted of a steel wall and two large stones. The setting alluded to Mr. Lee’s 1969 Things and Words piece, for which he exposed three sheets of Japanese paper to the elements and then exhibited them inside a museum.

During the performance, the dancers—who included Mr. Bokaer—interacted with each other in and around the sheets of paper and Mr. Lee’s sculpture. They created sounds with the paper, slapping it, shaking it, and crumbling it into a wad in order to communicate and interact with one another. At one point, three dancers each curled into a fetal position on one of the sheets and scrunched the paper together to form a cocoon around themselves. “I loved the paperwork!” one audience member chirped to The Observer.

Mr. Lee, the artist for whose retrospective the "paperwork" was commissioned, was a pivotal figure in the Japanese Mono-ha and Korean monochrome movements. Mr. Lee frequently utilizes austere industrial and natural materials, like rock, steel, and glass in his spare sculptures, which seem to engage in conversations with their viewers and the sites in which they are installed about what is seen and unseen in the world. In a Western museum, it looks like accomplished work by a long-forgotten Minimalist or Post-Minimalist.

Mr. Lee’s paintings are similarly understated, often consisting of single brushstrokes that begin firmly and slowly disappear as they cross the canvas. “The work literally evaporates,” Mr. Bokaer said of Mr. Lee’s paintings, a comment that recalls the title of the choreographer's work, On Vanishing.

Being performance-based and site-specific, concerned with the metaphysics of presence, and immersed in the abstract vocabulary of space, Mr. Bokaer's performance proved to be an ideal analog to Mr. Lee's work. At the same time, it went beyond being a mere supplement, becoming a nuanced expansion on Mr. Lee's piece, particularly by introducing a comparison between dance and sculpture.

“Dance is very ephemeral, whereas the sculpture is much more concrete,” Mr. Bokaer told The Observer of his thinking about the relationship between his choreography and Mr. Lee's piece, Dialogue.  However, “Lee Ufan’s philosophy [is] wonderful source material for dance, particularly his use of space, how line is used, how form is used, and absolutely, how the artist thinks about materials.”

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Patrick McMullan Co.

Following a series of six performances at the Park Avenue Armory that will run Dec. 29-31, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is set to shut down, in accordance with the wishes of its eponymous founder. Today, the New York Times reports that Aug. 15 has been set as the sale date for the tickets to those final shows.

The tickets, which will be available through the Park Avenue Armory’s website, armoryonpark.org, will sell for $10, per Mr. Cunningham’s stipulations.

Competition is likely to be fierce for those final shows, but New Yorkers  can also catch the M.C.D.C. at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in early December, when it will present six works, including RainForest (1968), which features Andy Warhol’s 1966 Silver Clouds sculptures.

In 2009, Mr. Cunningham announced that he would require his company to shut down two years following his death. He died less than two months later. The M.C.D.C. embarked on a two-year world tour in February, 2010.