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Dance review: Second Avenue Dance Company is a mixed bag – Metro US

Dance review: Second Avenue Dance Company is a mixed bag

Tomorrow is the last chance to catch Second Avenue Dance Company. Pictured is Andrea Miller's Tomorrow is the last chance to catch Second Avenue Dance Company. Pictured is Andrea Miller’s “Wonderland.”
Credit: Contributed

Top choreographers flock to university dance programs because that’s where the money is. Dance departments pay artists to set works, new or vintage, on good student dancers; they provide theaters, costumes, lighting and publicity. Nobody pays the dozens of dancers, who fork over tuition in exchange for the chance to perform.

About to graduate from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, members of the Second Avenue Dance Company have honed their chops and are ready for prime time. This weekend they’re showing works by local luminaries Mark Morris, Kyle Abraham and Andrea Miller, as well as San Franciscan Alex Ketley and several classmates.

For the most part, the big new pieces are overdressed and under-lit, and they have sound scores generated by machinery. The gray and black outfits by Ari Fulton (for Abraham’s speedy new “Continuous Relation”) and Brooke Cohen (for Ketley’s “Five Objects (in Isolation and Solitude)”) are attractive and ingenious, but their sheer profusion of design ideas distracts from the dances’ gestural sequences.

Both men and women wear Martin Pakledinaz’s long, tubular skirts in Morris’ “Pacific,” a pointe piece with overtones of religious ritual. To music by Lou Harrison played live on cello, violin and piano, the dancers bob and bow. The 1995 work looks rather stilted. An excerpt from Miller’s “Wonderland” gives the performers permission to go wild, and they do.

The most satisfying dance on the bill turns out to be MFA candidate Shannon Gillen’s sharp, clear quartet “Deep Sequencing,” brightly lit with the performers dressed in tights and tank tops. Sometimes the simplest solution is best.

If you go

Second Avenue Dance Company
Through Monday
Fifth Floor Theatre
111 Second Ave.
$5-$10, 212-998-1982
www.tisch.nyu.edu