On paper, Sunday night’s Fall for Dance looked pretty appetizing: some ballet, some modern, some Sinatra. And while it wasn’t quite as tasty as promised, this smorgasbord of a festival — at just $15 a ticket — remains a great way to sample a wide range of dance.
Pam Tanowitz’s “Fortune,” the large, demanding work that opened to live music, wasn’t easy for new dance fans. It takes its title from Charles Wuorinen’s score, a quartet for clarinet, piano, violin and cello that sounded like Brahms — if Brahms had written 12-tone music.
Bright red and purple leotards popped against the neon lime backdrop — but the matter-of-fact choreography was quietly academic and influenced by Merce Cunningham. The piece closes as a woman is carried off upside down, as a man watches her, jogging in place — an enigmatic ending to a difficult yet interesting dance.
The starry ballroom of Twyla Tharp’s “Sinatra Suite” promised a love story in five songs by Ol’ Blue Eyes. The songs were there, but the cast didn’t deliver the love.
American Ballet Theatre dancers Herman Cornejo and Luciana Paris came out in evening finery, and Paris was great — barreling across the stage and jumping into Cornejo’s arms as he put on his tuxedo jacket. But Cornejo never got the style. When he puffed his chest and posed, it looked as if he were getting ready to paddle over to “Swan Lake.”
Hong Kong Ballet’s dancers brought us Peter Quanz’s “Luminous,” a moody, romantic dance for eight, about changing liaisons. Yet the cast didn’t seem to get it. The work opened on a dark stage with the dancers teetering off balance, but they did that as if they were dipping their toes into a too-hot bath.
Martha Graham’s ubiquitous “Chronicle” is still a solid closer, even though it’s pieced together from the 1936 original. Flame-haired Blakeley White-McGuire held the stage in an enormous black skirt lined in crimson. She turned it inside out to drape around herself — a portent of bloody wars to come.
Women in severe black dresses shuffled backward laboriously, then jumped madly in place before White-McGuire returned in white to lead them toward a future peace — one that looked almost as martial as war.
The festival has three more programs left, offering everything from ballet to hula. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like everything you see: Like any buffet, it’s more about tasting the variety.