10 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY KA YOUNG LEE
As summer turns to fall, Lincoln Center snaps back to life. New York City Bal-
let’s four-week season, Sept. 17-Oct. 13 at the David H. Koch Theatre, opens
with five performances of the crowd-pleasing “Jewels,” from 1967, a celebra-
tion of ballet’s various accents and moods—sylvan and French in “Emeralds,”
cheekily American in “Rubies,” and nostalgically Russian in “Diamonds.”
Week two brings a program of new works (premièring on Sept. 26), with
pieces by the company member Lauren Lovette and Edwaard Liang, a for-
mer City Ballet dancer who now runs BalletMet. (That program closes with
Balanchine’s joyous “Symphony in C,” set to Bizet’s youthful symphony.) In
the second half of the season, the company presents a revival of Merce Cun-
ningham’s “Summerspace” (1958), in which the dancers move about the stage
like a pod of unpredictable creatures swimming through a sea of brightly
colored spots, on a set designed by Robert Rauschenberg.—Marina HarssAT THE BALLET
1
DANCE
Kathryn Posin Dance Company
92nd Street Y
Kathryn Posin has been making well-crafted
dances since 1967, and she isn’t stopping now.
Lately, she’s been attracted to unlikely subjects
for ballet, which she often handles whimsically.
“Evolution,” one of three new works presented
here, takes its text from the correspondence of
Charles Darwin during the years leading up to
“On the Origin of Species.” In “Triple Sextet,”
the ambition is more musical—six dancers set
against the interlocking rhythms of Steve Reich’s
“Double Sextet”—and “Memoir” is a solo for
Lance Westergard, a founding member of the
company.—Brian Seibert (Sept. 13-14.)National Ballet of Canada
Guggenheim Museum
The desire to retrieve a lost love from the grip of
death is powerful, speaking to our deepest fears.
Perhaps this is why the myth of Orpheus has
proven irresistible to storytellers of all stripes
for centuries. In November, the National Ballet
of Canada will offer a new iteration, “Orpheus
Alive,” imagined by Robert Binet, the company’s
young choreographic associate, in collaboration
with the dramaturge Rosamund Small and the
New York-based composer Missy Mazzoli. The
twist is that, here, Orpheus is a woman, and the
one she seeks in the underworld is her lover, who
died by his own hand. For the Guggenheim’s
“Works & Process” series, a group of dancers
from the excellent Toronto-based company will
perform excerpts; Binet, Small, and Mazzoli will
discuss the new ballet with New York City Bal-
let’s Wendy Whelan.—Marina Harss (Sept. 15.)Rubberband
Joyce Theatre
The name of Victor Quijada’s Montreal-based
company is also the name of his method: a
blend of street and contemporary styles with
the upside-down grace of capoeira, the weight
distribution of contact improv, and the snap and
flow of martial arts. It’s a technique well suited
to the theme of his piece “Ever So Slightly,”
which tracks large change in small increments
and searches for calm in chaos. The d.j.-com-
poser Jasper Gahunia and the violinist William
Lamoureux play their agitated ambient-rock
score live.—B.S. (Sept. 17-22.)Chamber Music
Spectrum
The key to Ensemble in Process... is in its name.
Established by the composer and pianist Brian
Mark, in 2016, the group is less a fixed entity
than a fluid approach to presenting new music
in fresh contexts and juxtapositions. Here, Mark
and his cohorts present “Light of Strings,” a
program inspired by notions of faith, grief, and
catharsis. Selections include a cello quartet by
Ryan Brown and solo and duo pieces by Mark,
Satie, Messiaen, Meredith Monk, Michael Gor-
don, and Missy Mazzoli. The following evening,
two improvising chamber ensembles perform.
VEER Quartet presents compositions by its
leader, the violinist Sarah Bernstein, with plenty
of room for spontaneous elaboration and un-
bounded interplay. Treesearch, a duo comprising
the violinist Keir GoGwilt and the bassist Kyle
Motl, follows with its own brand of in-the-mo-
ment invention, mingling rich tones, rhapsodic
gestures, and companionable jousts.—S.S. (Sept.
14 at 7 and Sept. 15 at 7 and 8:30.)
The Orchestra Now
Fisher Center
OUT OF TOWN Leon Botstein leads Bard Col-
lege’s The Orchestra Now in its season-opening
performance at the Fisher Center, in Annan-
dale-on-Hudson, New York. The orchestra’s
graduate students play through Galina Ust-
volskaya’s Symphonic Poem No. 1 and Cop-
land’s Symphony No. 3, in which the com-
poser deploys the bright, rousing strains of his
“Fanfare for the Common Man” as a theme
in the final movement. The soprano Paulina
Swierczek, who won the school’s 2019 concerto
competition, joins the players for Strauss’s
Four Songs, Op. 27, his less famous but still
ravishing quartet of pieces for voice and or-
chestra.—O.Z. (Sept. 14 at 8 and Sept. 15 at 2.)Alarm Will Sound
Various locations
Alarm Will Sound, a twenty-person chamber
ensemble that champions new music, has just
released a recording of Donnacha Dennehy’s
arrestingly beautiful cantata “The Hunger,”
which reflects on the mass devastation of Ire-
land’s Great Famine. The group’s strings and
woodwinds oscillate throughout the piece,
creating a shimmery landscape where life is
precious and precarious. Against that backdrop,
the soprano Katherine Manley and the sean-nós
vocalist Iarla Ó Lionáird sing eloquently of the
blight’s impact. The recording’s performers
bring the piece to Princeton Sound Kitchen, inNew Jersey, where it appears on a program with
student work, and to the Kaufman Music Cen-
ter, on the Upper West Side, where it is paired
with Eartheater’s “When Fire Is Allowed to
Finish.”—O.Z. (Sept. 17 at 8 and Sept. 19 at 7:30.)1
THE THEATRE
Dust
Fourth Street Theatre
This punishingly sad and sometimes surprisingly
funny one-woman performance, written and