BAAND Together Dance Festival Review
July 26, 2023 | Damrosch Park (Lincoln Center) – New York, NY, USA
If you could bottle the air on Wednesday night’s balmy outdoor performance of the BAAND Together Dance Festival, it would contain that elusive feeling that only comes from a New York City summer: dewy sweat, sundry indistinguishable conversations, a welcome breeze replacing daylight, a gradually lowering entropy as audience members found their seats.
I found myself seated next to a woman who brought her tiny dog (which I was overjoyed by) but something about the gentle, wet nose that found its way to my elbow crease, the intermittent airplanes overhead, and distant sirens made it feel like everyone who came together that night decided to accept the city’s chaos and just enjoy dance.
BAAND is an acronymic representation of five prominent dance companies in New York City: Ballet Hispanico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem. Along with being a centralizing magnet for dance, the festival also provides daily Education Workshops where anyone who wishes to move their body can learn one company’s core style, rotating throughout the 5-day festival.
The shows are also free, further solidifying the meaning behind “banding together” by making dance easily accessible.
BAAND Together Dance Festival Review
Ballet Hispanico opened the program with Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Línea Recta. The number has all the sensuality and tension of a flamenco dance but breaks down the invisible walls that are present between partners in the traditional dance form.
Like flamenco, which uses long dramatic pauses, the piece starts with the commanding Amanda del Valle on center stage with her back to us, allowing the strings of Eric Vaarzon Morel’s guitar to slowly possess her until their power takes over. Her long skirt trailed far behind her and served as a prop to the creative partnering, either wrapping it through her legs or over her shoulder or even used as a leash which her four partners utilized to hold her back like an angry bull.
The fiery dancing, bright red costumes, and pulsing music drove several amateur videographers (aka audience members) to take out their phones. Something about being outside must make people feel like that can break the no phones rule (which was announced at the start of the show) although no staff members seemed to want to chastise anyone. The record buttons were busy all night.
American Ballet Theatre presented Other Dances by Jerome Robbins: a sweet pas de deux to a playlist of Frederic Chopin’s mazurkas and waltzes played on a live piano. Infused with folk-movements, inspired by the mazurka’s triple meter, the dance has a refined pedestrian quality to it as if the partners are walking together in a field of flowers, commenting on this and that flora.
Danced on Wednesday evening by principals Isabella Boylston and Joo Wan Ahn, the duo looked calm and cool. The summer breeze often caught Boylston’s thin skirt, rippling behind her as she gazed into the distance or balanced precariously long in one of her signature supple arabesques.
Ahn showcased bursts of energy in manèges and assemblé jumps, but simmered down for delicate moments like a flashy grin shared with Boylston or a silly moment in the choreography where he must pretend to be dizzy.
The pair balanced each other nicely and the piece brought balance to the program as well; where almost all the other numbers leaned on power, Other Dances remained subtle and precise.
Dance Theatre of Harlem performed the juxtaposing Nyman String Quartet No. 2 by Robert Garland set to Michael Nyman’s music of the same name. A group of ten dancers in busy black, white, and either a shade of blue or pink color-blocked and striped costumes, brought both conventional neo-classical and contemporary club moves to the floor.
Although it lost its edge in a few places, the piece found a center through leading dancer Kouadio Davis. He delivered lovely, clean turns but his approach to dancing was meditative and scrupulous, particularly in a solo of expressive modernist arm gestures: hands carving forward and back, a fist raised to the sky.
As a glimpse into what the company can do, it suffices but it doesn’t showcase all the power that DTH dancers contain.
The evening also included a world premiere commissioned by Lincoln Center and choreographed by Pedro Ruiz, a former Ballet Hispanico dancer. Pas de O’Farrill featured music by Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and evoked the fire of competitive Salsa.
The choreography leaned into that competitive dance nature but attempted to infuse it with ballet. Although the dancers punctuated every step, there was a flatness to the number save for a few exciting partnering moves like the one-handed cartwheel into an overhead press.
Representing the only piece during the BAAND Together Dance Festival that merged two companies, featuring del Valle (Ballet Hispánico) and Andres Zuniga (NYCB), it was refreshing to see different companies working together. Although logistically probably a nightmare, it would be nice to see a large group number for all five companies.
Alvin Ailey and NYCB rounded out the BAAND Together Dance Festival evening with two pieces that served as back-to-back finales.
Ailey’s Dancing Spirit choreographed by Ronald K. Brown begins with two dancers, serene and grounded but builds into a dynamic, expressive, unrestricted dance. Brown’s steps have a conversational feel to them, the dancers changing direction abruptly and shaking fingers at each other accompanied by music from Duke Ellington, Wynton Marsalis, and War.
But what might be the most beautiful movements were the dancer’s freedom of the head – something classical ballet tends to lack. Brown has the dancers brush their own faces side to side with their palms or their chins reach to the sky, a great release upward.
A mesmerizing leader of the nine dancers, Constance Stamatiou delivered perfect moon-shaped arcs stretching from hand to foot, deep plies, and piercing glances. Not alone in the breadth of her movement, all the dancers of Ailey are generous which the audience recognized with a deserving standing ovation.
Closing out the show was Justin Peck’s urgently poetic The Times Are Racing. This number is always accompanied by a very loud score by Dan Deacon – don’t get me wrong, the music is exuberant and beautiful, stirring and demanding, but it was played so loudly on Wednesday night that I was almost uncomfortable (the little dog next to me wasn’t into it either).
Besides that, the NYCB dancers seemed more in tune with the message than ever. Maybe it was the temperature, or maybe it was that special NYC summer air, but everyone appeared relaxed yet ready.
Brittany Pollock and Peter Walker were the leading duo, meeting up for fervent tap sequences (in sneakers) and fleeting moments where Walker was leading Pollock around like Orpheus.
Victor Abreu and Daniel Applebaum danced the delicate pas de deux in the middle of the piece. Their glances were electric and the partnering was full of tender care.
The number ends with the dancers all collapsing to the floor against a long, drawn out electric chord, perhaps saying that the times are racing but we might not make it to the finish line.
BAAND Together Dance Festival delivers on its promise – bringing great NYC dance companies together. In doing that it also threads community together. I look forward to another quintessential summer night of dance in 2024.
Featured Photo for the Lincoln Center BAAND Together Dance Festival review of Ballet Hispánico’s Dylan Dias McIntyre, Leonardo Brito, and Amanda del Valle in Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Línea Recta. Photo by Richard Termine.
