4 Houston Dancers at Fall for Dance

Symphony in C choreographed by George Balanchine
Artists of Houston Ballet
Amitava Sarkar

Enjoy this photo of Houston Ballet in Symphony in C; you have to read on to see how it fits in to this storyette in a round about post IKE-brained way.

Usually this time of year I am in New York enjoying Fall for Dance at City Center and anything else I can fit in. So, instead of enjoying boat loads of dance and the chirpy rock concert audience at ten bucks a pop, I picked up Ike's wreckage on my front yard and waited (not as long as most of you) for the lights to come back on. And what a year two miss, four, count em, Houston dancers in one night. Houston Ballet's Sara Webb and Connor Walsh performed Balanchine's Tchaikovsky's pas de deux, and Ayman Harper and Mario Zambrano performed Richard Siegal's New 45.

You may remember Harper and Zambrano from Domenic Walsh Dance Theatre's early shows. It may have been DWDT's second show that featured Dream Piles and Bed Fears, or was it Bed Piles and Dream Fears. I remember it was raw, unfinished, somewhat disturbing, incorporated text and Walsh's fabulous dancing. A made a mental note to keep Harper on my radar. He also returned here a few winters back to show some of his own work at Barnevelder.

Zambrano has done work for DWDT and The Met and danced with Walsh in a Dance Salad program. The two of them had quite a chemistry.

There is some talk of Harper returning to his home turf. Stay tuned on that. There was no shortage of fuss over Harper and Zambrano's dancing in the Fall For Dance program.

It would have been fun to be there to cheer for the hometeam. Oh well. I would have felt terrible leaving you all powerless while I strolled around the big apple amusing myself. So I will let other's speak on FFD. Here's Susan Reiter's Dance View Times review and Claudia La Rocco's review is here.

Head to Dance Magazine's editor in chief's blog to get a FFD overview.

Back on the home turf Webb and Walsh were also paired in Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun and in Balanchine's Symphony in C in HB's Classically Modern. Here's the Houston Chronicle review, and The Houston Press. You have two more chances to catch that. I will be doing the dance talks on Friday and twice on Saturday and the wonderful Christina Giannelli will be my guest.

Now back to Symphony in C, that ballet can single-handedly chase away the IKE blues.