From New York With Love: Connecting With People
Photos of Alvin Ailey Dance Company: Paul Kolnik. The Stuttgart Ballet: Roman Novitzky. I-Ling Liu: press images. Remaining photos: Olivia Merola.
September 27, 2025
Dear Reader,
It’s that time of the year when you start to anticipate the first autumnal chill, the kind that has you looking over your shoulder, waiting to be shaken from your post-summer daze. Sometimes I step outside, and I want to shout, “where are you?!…Hit me! HIT me! And then, it eventually does.
This year, fall didn’t greet me on the street; it found me in the rows of New York City Center, an esteemed Midtown institution with its own kind of seasonal ritual. There’s something about the buzz of this theater that just hits differently. The crowd is a mix. Some I recognize as dancers themselves; others are veterans of the NYC arts scene (who have already studied the program and have their nearest exit mapped by heart). And then there are those simply looking for a new adventure.
Of course, I’m talking about Fall for Dance, the beloved annual dance festival that brings world-class companies from all corners of the world to one stage.
The true adventurers that night arrived at the theater an hour early for a pre-show dance lesson taught by Alicia Graf Mack, Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Watching my fellow audience members warm up, laugh, and awkwardly arrange themselves in lines across the marble lobby felt like its own kind of performance. We learned select choreography from Alvin Ailey’s Grace, which was to be performed that night, but the real choreography, I realized, was about connection and humanness. These were things that we were not explicitly taught, but something that unfolded on stage just moments later.
Our program that evening opened with The Stuttgart Ballet, who entranced us with Three for Hans, a ballet choreographed by Hans van Manen and composed of three parts. The hypnotizing eroticism of the duets, layered with Manen’s delicate choreographic quality, showcased a piece as rich and mouthwatering as a dark chocolate truffle with raspberry jam in the center.
The first two sections were duets, with partners exuding a magnetic to and fro with one another--full of play. The final section--a trio with electrifying speed and an undercurrent of competition, each dancer plotting to outdo the other. Through all three sections, Manen’s message was clear: in which ways do we connect with one another?
I continued to ruminate on that same question. In I-Ling Liu’s … and, or… a 20-minute duet performed without music, Liu confronted us with the work of relationships: the physical, exhaustive, and even comedic interpersonal negotiations between people, and perhaps, between audience and performer.
As the piece unraveled itself, the room became fidgety. Theater seats squeaked; an email chime echoed. The dancers huffed and puffed, sweat dripping onto the Marley floor, and in a way, it felt like we were all a part of the performance. Our collective breath rose and fell, and then rose and fell again.
A sequence of choreography began to repeat over and over. At first, what seemed like comical gestures, gradually began to carry weight. In their repetition, I started to see something familiar: the emotional labor of connection. Boundaries, subtleties, the physical sounds of the body, falling, rising, getting up again. Reaching for a hand, pulling it away, latching on, letting go. These moments not only played out on the stage, but perhaps within the navigations of our own relationships.
As New York City Center’s Principal Dance Company, it felt only right that Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater closed the evening. They did so with Ronald K. Brown's Grace. This large ensemble was charged and alive, rooted in both modern dance and West African idioms. Brown’s choreographic pulse was layered with Peven Everett’s “Gabriel” and the spiritual soul of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday.” Echoes from our pre-show dance class reappeared; I even caught a few audience members nodding along and lighting up when they recognized the movements we had so feverishly tried to learn just hours before.
Tonight, I had come looking for something. I’m still not sure quite what, but whatever it was, I think I found it. I saw it in the glance of a duet, the slap of a hand on a thigh, the thump of the house music, the awkward laugh when someone forgot the choreography. Maybe what I was searching for was just people being people.
In connection,
Olivia