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Dance Reflections, a festival dedicated to choreographic innovation, is not ready to wrap yet: It picks up again next week with a collaboration between the choreographer Dimitri Chamblas and the musician Kim Gordon.<\/p>\n
But much has already been presented, providing something that has increasingly been missing in New York in recent years: experimental dance from abroad \u2014 in this case, mainly France. Beyond the programs themselves, New York institutions needed this programming boost \u2014 artistically and financially. Dance Reflections, produced by Van Cleef & Arpels, is a reminder of a time when festivals routinely brought contemporary dance to the city.<\/p>\n
Is it a surprise that a luxury jewelry company is footing the bill? Hardly. In a performing arts world of scarce funding and resources, such support makes sense. And in collaborating with New York venues \u2014 among them, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City Center, NYU Skirball \u2014 the festival has been a salve.<\/p>\n
For the New York iteration of Dance Reflections<\/a> \u2014 the event has also been held in Hong Kong and London \u2014 Serge Laurent, Van Cleef & Arpels\u2019s director of dance and culture program, had a plan: to bookend it with influential works of contemporary dance, to show how history leads to inspiration. To start, he chose \u201cDance,\u201d a 1979 masterpiece with choreography by Lucinda Childs, music by Philip Glass and, originally, a film of the dancers by Sol LeWitt. (The festival will end at the Park Avenue Armory with a re-creation of \u201cThe Rite of Spring,\u201d<\/a> a classic work by Pina Bausch, with dancers from 14 African nations.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This \u201cDance,\u201d though, had some problems. Performed by the Lyon Opera Ballet at New York City Center, Oct. 19-21, the restaging featured a 2016 film of its dancers that is identical, according to the program, to LeWitt\u2019s original film featuring Childs and her cast. The LeWitt film, with its larger-than-life dancers, shifts the audience\u2019s perspective, giving way to a dreamlike setting where bodies drift and sail almost angelically. With a different generation, though, the new film was a distraction, taking viewers out of the dance rather than drawing them into its world.<\/p>\n The Lyon experience was flatter, more presentational than lived \u2014 and also confusing. It\u2019s not the same \u201cDance.\u201d Why should it be called such?<\/p>\n The meat of the festival, though, has been the work of a younger generation, especially that of dance artists seldom seen in New York, if at all. Debuts came from Ola Maciejewska, for whom the renegade choreographer Lo\u00efe Fuller was a point of departure; and (La)Horde, the spirited dance collective that now leads Ballet National de Marseille. Doroth\u00e9e Munyaneza, a Rwandan dance artist whose family fled Kigali for London in 1994 after the genocide, brought a work addressing, in part, the memory of violence. The festival also included welcome returns: Boris Charmatz, Rachid Ouramdane and Gis\u00e8le Vienne.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At BAM, \u201cCorps Extr\u00eames,\u201d by Rachid Ouramdane and Compagnie de Chaillot, did double duty: It was part of Dance Reflections, but also one of just seven productions included in BAM\u2019s annual Next Wave Festival. (Programming-wise, this is <\/a>thin<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>) Ouramdane\u2019s meditative exploration of extreme sports and acrobatic movement washed over the stage like a balm. It was transporting, not just because of its imagery \u2014 a tightrope walker crossing high above the stage, mountain landscapes projected over a white climbing wall, acrobats jumping from shoulders onto<\/em> that wall \u2014 but also because of its plush, gentle atmosphere: sensation as<\/em> performance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There were no aggressive thuds from these lithe, floating acrobats. What made the experience even more luminous was the way they landed or ascended into the air, making it almost seem as though the stage was really a cloud. It wasn\u2019t Ouramdane\u2019s most experimental work, but in his dismantling of the conventional rules of time and space, it made you reconsider what experimental could be.<\/p>\n Vienne\u2019s \u201cL\u2019\u00c9tang,\u201d a dance-theater adaptation of a short play by the Swiss writer Robert Walser, was one of two presentations at New York Live Arts. It is a blistering example of the choreographer\u2019s controlled, precise slow movement, which warps and stretches time. With formidable performances by Ad\u00e8le Haenel and Julie Shanahan \u2014 they took on multiple roles \u2014 Vienne\u2019s exacting pacing was both amazing and excruciating. Like Ouramdane\u2019s \u201cCorps,\u201d it wasn\u2019t conventional dancing. But Vienne\u2019s choreographic precision created sensation; uncomfortable as it was, it broadened the idea of what a dance can be.<\/p>\n In \u201cMailles,\u201d also at Live Arts, Munyaneza braided the lives and stories of five Black women (African artists or artists of African descent) in order to explore how abandonment leads to feminine freedom and power. As personal stories unfold through music, text, dance and even the performers\u2019 costumes \u2014 designed by St\u00e9phanie Coudert \u2014 a collective memory builds through a choir of sound and movement. As mesmerizing as the performers were (none as vivid as Nido Uwera), the threads of their stories had trouble binding together as one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At the French Institute Alliance Fran\u00e7aise, Maciejewska highlighted three performers \u2014 and loads of fabric \u2014 in \u201cBombyx Mori\u201d to draw a connection between the silkworm and Fuller\u2019s \u201cSerpentine Dance\u201d<\/a> (1892), which incorporated lights and billowing fabric to transform a dancer into a human butterfly. The link between the silkworm and the dance was a little dubious, but visually and sonically \u201cBombyx\u201d had its moments \u2014 especially when microphones dangling from the ceiling picked up the sound of the rustling fabric manipulated by the trio with curving swoops of the arms.<\/p>\n Charmatz performed a solo, \u201cSomnole,\u201d<\/a> which explored the moment just before sleep overcomes a body. Set to whistling renditions of music including \u201cSummertime\u201d and \u201cThe Pink Panther\u201d \u2014 performed by Charmatz himself as his ever-drifting body wavered between drowsiness and alertness \u2014 the solo was intended to impart, as he wrote on his website, \u201cthe undertow of daydreams and the scream of awakening.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While it achieved that to an extent, what it looked and sounded like was not so enticing: noisy mime. But Charmatz is a beautiful, generous dancer whose presence was a reminder of France Moves, a festival that feels like the unofficial precursor to Dance Reflections. That festival, which arrived in New York in 2001, served as an introduction to Charmatz, then the youngest and most intriguing choreographer on the lineup. His \u201cherses (une lente introduction),\u201d with a nude cast, took place at the Kitchen, a theater that rarely presents dance at all these days. It used to be a force.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Charmatz, now the director of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, has himself grown into a force in contemporary dance. And (La)Horde<\/a> \u2014 at least judging by Dance Reflections \u2014 is on that route, too. Its \u201cRoom With a View,\u201d a collaboration with the composer Rone, moved from violence to peace with decisive attack and crystalline tenderness, but the group\u2019s mixed bill, featuring works by Childs, Lasseindra Ninja and the collective, was even more of an indication of how wide its creative lens is.<\/p>\n