Review: Fall for Dance Returns, Problems Intact

The Fall for Dance Festival got its start at New York City Center 20 years ago with a $10 ticket price and a worthy aim: to introduce the art form to new audiences. Admission is now $30, but the goal of spreading the gospel of dance remains the same.

On Wednesday, Wendy Whelan, the associate artistic director of New York City Ballet, unveiled the 21st edition with an opening night speech pointing out that each of the evening’s choreographers — Alexei Ratmansky, Tiler Peck and Andrea Miller — has ties to City Ballet. Whelan is a lovely, warm speaker, but having her open the program seemed a little out of left field. While she has performed at City Center, she doesn’t actually work there.

Fall for Dance, frustratingly, is as hit or miss as ever, but on opening night, something else was in short supply: range. For a festival prized for its diversity of styles, such familiar voices — even though Miller is a contemporary choreographer as opposed to ballet — didn’t amount to much of a stretch.

At least the program, the first of five, began on an evocative note with Ratmansky’s “Wartime Elegy,” a ballet that is somber and sweet in equal measure. Performed by the National Ballet of Ukraine, a company that has persisted despite the war, the work spotlights a community that seems to know what it’s like to live through loss and desolation — even to dance through it.

But the dance, created for the Pacific Northwest Ballet in 2022, seems like a rough sketch of “Solitude,” a more harrowing, masterful work by Ratmansky that delves more deeply into the horror of war and was unveiled last winter at City Ballet, where the choreographer is artist in residence. “Wartime Elegy,” performed by the Ukrainian company with some shaky moments, has the bones of “Solitude” — and even bones by Ratmansky are worth watching.

Set to music for piano and strings by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov along with recordings of folk music, “Wartime Elegy” begins in semidarkness. The dancers’ limbs glow, cutting through the moody landscape. Soon bodies spring into action, sometimes like lush brushstrokes, at other times stuttering. What is unsaid, unseen? For all of their robust physicality, this is a community bonded and torn by buried emotions.