http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/arts/lucinda-childs-and-alvin-ailey-troupe-at-fall-for-dance.html 2014-10-13 00:05:11 Lucinda Childs and Alvin Ailey Troupe at Fall for Dance Fall for Dance’s second program had thrilling elements but was lacking depth. === The four works on Fall for Dance’s second program were all studies in surface style: showy, elaborate and empty. On Friday, each was more popular than the one before with the City Center audience and less popular with me — until the last, which sent me out of the theater with a smile. Lucinda Childs’s I kept wanting to take pleasure in their remarkable degree of accomplishment; but I couldn’t, because they seemed to be forever tense, braced, guarded, counting their way through a tough assignment. Though they often paused, their stillnesses had none of the expressive dance quality that can be found in either the Merce Cunningham repertory or certain forms of ballet; these dancers were just coldly efficient, like interior parts of a moving clock. This tension even robbed them of elegance. Six women and five men from Dresden’s Semperoper Ballett performed William Forsythe’s “Neue Suite” (2012), delivering a long series of male-female pas de deux. I ought to commend several features of this; there was always real give and take between man and woman, and the idiom was post-George Balanchine, full of off-balance lunges, high-sweeping legwork and part-acrobatic wow. But each pas de deux became an inexpressive nothing; the dancers drew attention to their own skill and their modernity like models showing couture. Any moments of drama turned out to be mere effects. The style was all mere facade; and facade here was everything. Mr. Forsythe’s choreographic musicality is at best superficial. “Neue Suite” is danced to items by Handel, Luciano Berio, Thom Willems and Bach but uses their rhythms (well, a few of them) rather than addressing their spirit. Everything was slick, self-admiring, horridly focused on making a flashy impression. The program ended with two studies in advanced absurdism, again laden with crowd-pleasing effects. In “AP15” (2010), Sébastien Ramirez & The evening ended with Ohad Naharin’s absurdist Friday’s dancers seemed, like bulls, attracted to the color red. Five of the women they brought to the stage were wearing scarlet tops; and one of them was On this occasion — the evening before her superb debut in Balanchine’s “Chaconne” with City Ballet — she was a vision of glamour: red top, skintight black jeans with sparkly bottoms, five-inch ultra-stiletto heels, blond hair pouring down her shoulders almost to her waist. She was riveting even when she stood completely still to watch her Ailey partner dance; and when she moved, she was enthralling: gleeful, sweet, rippling through the body. (Two of the older women brought onto the stage also proved marvelous performers. One of them was like a redhead Lily Tomlin.) As the Ailey dancers, one by one, sent their partners back to the audience,