Fall for Dance Program 5 Review
October 2, 2026 | New York City Center – New York, NY, USA
City Center’s Fall For Dance Festival promises audiences “See The World’s Best.” However, Program 5 promised something else. In the triple bill, each dance aimed to stand out, but none made a lasting impression.
Pony Cam’s kinda like that pursued provocation, Alexei Ratmansky’s Roses from the South: Three Waltzes for Toby disrupted rules of traditional ballet, and Stephanie Lake’s Seven Days relied heavily on the contemporary-dance aesthetic that dominates so much of the field today.
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Fall for Dance Program 5 Review
A Melbourne-based quintet, Pony Cam, launched the show with kinda like that. The performers came in front of the curtain and introduced themselves one by one and continued to interact with the audience throughout the performance. They explained that the work was a research project based on City Center’s historical 472 dance presentations, positioning themselves as responsible borrowers of that anthology.
The idea itself was genuinely clever. There was something appealing about using City Center’s own history as the material for a work presented on its stage.
Robbie Divine’s music, with its persistent tick-tock, metronome-like sound, also gave the piece an appropriate sense of time and history unfolding. Names of famous choreographers whose works were presented at City Center appeared on the backdrop as the performers playfully roasted and reenacted their work.
George Balanchine was reduced to a few tendus and pliés. Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance and Alvin Ailey’s Revelations were referenced, along with the iconic lift from Angelin Preljocaj’s Le Parc, tap dancing, and what the performers called “black and white” dances.
Sometimes the movement corresponded directly to the choreographer being referenced; other times, the connection was deliberately absurd.
For much of this first half, the audience was laughing and actively engaged. One of the most successful sections was their parody of Ohad Naharin’s Echad Mi Yodea, in which they both reenacted and explained the choreographic significance of the original.
They also “modernized” The Dying Swan, noting that Anna Pavlova “died” thousands of times in her career, and referenced Maureen Fleming’s naked body in her The Stairs, Charles Moulton’s Precision Ball Passing, and other moments from dance history.
Then the tone changed abruptly as the house went dark and the music shifted into something tense.
The five dancers stood midstage and slowly began removing their tops as the audience applauded. The two women, initially wearing nude-colored sports bras, turned upstage to remove them before returning to face the audience, bare-breasted. All five remained in place, stretching their arms out in demi second, breathing deeply.
Pony Cam had disclosed earlier in the performance that City Center featured some “shirtless dances”, but I wasn’t prepared to actually see them reenacted. At that moment, the provocation became the dominant message of the work for me, and the piece felt more like a graduate school thesis project gone wild than a fully realized dance.
The naked body can certainly have an artistic purpose in dance (by the way, there was no nudity advisory in the program), but here I see it as inserting shock rather than substance… so I kinda checked out after that.
Next came Ratmansky’s New York premiere of Roses from the South: Three Waltzes for Toby, performed by the lovely dancers of Miami City Ballet.
“One waltz is for women, one waltz is for men, and one is for all of them together,” Ratmansky explained in his interview for the Guggenheim’s Works & Process.
And this was the only piece in the program that sorta worked for me.
As the curtain rose, three ballerinas ran across the stage, their port de bras suggesting the motion of washing clothes. Macarena Gimenez immediately caught my attention in a peridot-colored dress, dancing a solo across the stage to Johann Strauss. Another dancer, Hannah Fischer, was equally dazzling in sky blue, waltzing in shiny pointe shoes before finishing an attitude and revealing a sleek French twist. The women’s pastel costumes also brought to mind Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering.
Hints of Balanchine’s Serenade were everywhere. A canon peeled across the stage; a pyramid formation took shape among the women; a ballerina was held by her leg in first arabesque; and women walked on pointe in a windmill-like formation.
There is plenty of choreographic brilliance here, but eventually I realized that Ratmansky’s choice for gender-neutral partnering ultimately distracted me from the work’s sparks.
Women partnered women in movements that traditionally would require a male partner. One ballerina was promenaded in attitude derrière to the sounds of the violin only to fall momentarily off pointe when her shorter female partner could not quite reach her top hand. Elsewhere, dancers in the back appeared visibly shaky as they tried to maintain their holds.
For the second waltz, eight men entered from stage right, two by two. They gradually formed a geometric line, with some hopping into retiré positions. Later came a suggestion of the fouetté turns from Balanchine’s Symphony in C. Much of the section looked like four couples taking turns waltzing, tugging, and performing cabrioles in a garden – so much so that, at times, I felt as though I were watching Les Ballets Trockadero.
One couple even performed boureés around each other reminiscent of the Bluebird pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty while another paid more homage to Balanchine with the double-attitude lift from Apollo.
Ratmansky then introduced an accumulation, borrowing movements from earlier in the section, when the men danced their way back to standing from the floor. One dancer launched himself into the air to be caught by the others, and the section built toward a series of saut de chats exiting on a diagonal, reminiscent of the leaps in John Cranko’s Onegin. The final dancer lunged into the arms of several men, while another slid onto the floor and posed on his side like a fashion model.
The final section brought all sixteen dancers back onstage with the couples taking turns performing comic episodes for the audience. One woman fainted while everyone else continued to waltz around her. Another shimmied at her partner. And a couple sat in lotus position and appeared to meditate. The musical choreography eventually built into lifts over the men’s shoulders before ending with the women leaping into the men’s arms.
Ratmansky demonstrated his much admired choreographic status in Roses. The dancers were beautiful and the choreography was musically intelligent. Yet I found myself increasingly distracted by the work’s insistence on gender-neutral partnering. Rather than making me feel that this work could save the show, the emphasis of girl-girl and boy-boy partnering made me think about the concept itself rather than the work’s significance.
The evening concluded with The Australian Ballet, directed by David Hallberg, who happened to take a candid selfie before the performance with Miami City Ballet director Gonzalo Garcia right in front of me in the aisle. Having admired him for years as a former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, I was especially excited to see what Hallberg has done with the company.
Unfortunately, Seven Days, choreographed by Stephanie Lake, left me wondering where the innovation was.
The work seemed to follow the existing aesthetic trends of contemporary dance, so much so that I had seen it all before: dancers sliding across the floor in socks, sudden and seemingly random convulsions, mysterious lights flashing in the background, collective freak-out sessions, sculptural and gestural poses, heavy breathing, talented dancers dancing in something vague, and what I like to call “phloor-ing” (my own term for phrases performed on the floor).
There were elements I enjoyed. Peter Brikmanis’s music, inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, boosted the mood of the perplexing piece.
I was especially intrigued by the opening canon that echoed, which immediately created some curiosity.
The dancers jabbed, typed, covered their faces, turned inward, reached, and performed battements while traveling across the stage in a line. For a moment, I thought maybe this was going somewhere.
Later, chairs were introduced, and the dancers arranged themselves into various shapes and positions while using pauses between poses to create tension. A man suddenly ran butt-naked across the stage (yet another unnecessary utilization of nudity in the show). The work also explored both same-sex and heterosexual partnering, and interestingly, the women seemed to dance with considerably more fierceness than the men who projected delicacy.
In fact, one observation followed me throughout the entire night: women dominated the majority of the evening, especially the women from kinda like that.
By the end, I found myself wishing the program had been arranged differently. I would have preferred to experience the works from least rebellious to most: Miami City Ballet, Australian Ballet, then Pony Cam. Having Roses from the South sandwiched between the other two made it harder for me to digest Ratmansky’s work. I wanted more time to absorb its moments of purity, innocence, and classical beauty before being hit with the layered messages of the other two works.
Taken together, the three works left me to conclude that provocation, rule-breaking, and following trends aren’t enough to produce originality. And when originality is reduced, will there be any substance left? Kinda, sorta, maybe?
The answer is a resounding “no”.
Featured Photo of Dancer from Miami City Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky’s Roses from the South: Three Waltzes for Toby at NY City Center. Photo by Hisae Aihara.
