Fall for Dance 2016

On Thursday, October 6th, 2016, I went to see the Fall for Dance Festival performance at The New York City Center. Among the many companies who performed that evening was Jessica Lang Dance, The Royal Ballet Flanders, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Alina Cojocaru, Friedemann Vogel, Johan Kobborg, and The Sarasota Ballet.

During Cojocaru's, Vogel's, Kobborg, and The Sarasota Ballet's performance of Marguerite and Armand, their was a live pianist who accompanied the ballet. The ballet tells the story of Marguerite and Armand's love affair before Marguerite falls ill and dies.

There is a moment in the ballet when Cojocaru is lying on a fainting couch and coughing, about to succumb to her illness. I'm not certain what the key signature was, or even if there was one during this time, although the pianist had sheet music that he played from the entire ballet. In any case, the pianist was playing the coughs of Cojocaru in this scene. As a dancer, Cojocaru didn't actually make the noise of the cough, but merely opened her mouth and did the contracting motion that looked like coughing. But I thought it was amazing how in sync the pianist a Cojocaru were at this time, as if she were coughing piano notes. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen.

In addition to this, the phrasing of the music was also made to evoke, not just the sad and dark feeling of someone dying from an illness, but also the rhythm patterns and pitches of actual coughing. It gave the ballet a very realistic, eery feeling that made it come alive.