Favorite Returns-Freshness Still In Its Step

             Less than half of the quadruple bill that opens this year’s Fall for Dance season is much good — and yet, like so many Fall for Dance programs over the years, it’s refreshing. This intensely popular annual festival at City Center presents several works by different artists on each program; this year’s, for the first time, are spread over 12 evenings in three weeks. The emphasis is always on the modern and the unfamiliar; even when you decide you don’t care for some offerings, you’re usually still taken somewhere new. (Those of you who need your dance fixes from the “Don Quixote” pas de deux, go elsewhere.)

Thursday’s opening night included a world premiere, a United States premiere, a New York premiere and a work that, though not listed as any kind of novelty, was new to this seasoned dancegoer. It seems characteristic of Fall for Dance that three of them belonged to no single dance genre.

In “Five Movements, Three Repeats” (the New York premiere), Christopher Wheeldon offers a crossover event for four dancers: one of its two women is a barefoot modern dancer, the other a ballerina in point shoes. Jarek Cemerek’s “Void” (the United States premiere), danced by 10 chaps from the British company BalletBoyz, could be called an all-male urban ballet; it tries to be a modern equivalent of Jerome Robbins’s “West Side Story.” “Shutters Shut” (hitherto unknown to me) is a clever, arch construction for a quasi-androgynous man and woman, Astrid Boons and Quentin Roger from Nederlands Dans Theater. To label it modern dance seems at once adequate and misleading.

“Transformation in Tap,” the world premiere by, and starring, Jared Grimes, can be categorized — it’s tap — but actually its subject is transition. With the help of a taped voice-over, Mr. Grimes tells and demonstrates (with four co-dancers) the several stages of tap finesse through which he has to pass: starting with all-aggressive speed, adding upper-body suavity, adjusting his idiom to suit contemporary electronic music. Despite the self-deprecation, this isn’t a completely good idea; even at the end, Mr. Grimes lacks aspects of upper-body grace and softer dynamics. Still, his final sequence is a circuit of tapping turns with endearingly giddy charm. Just as I was settling into what he did best, the curtain descended.

I reviewed Mr. Wheeldon’s “Five Movements, Three Repeats” at the Vail International Dance Festival this summer. Danced by one modern dancer (Fang-Yi Sheu) and three members of New York City Ballet, it’s set to five musical items by the composer Max Richter. One of them, a pas de deux for Wendy Whelan and Tyler Angle, is Mr. Richter’s remix of Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” Another — a dance for those three and Craig Hall, moving individually in separate zones — is repeated three times, on one occasion spatially reversed, as if seen from behind.

There’s a very welcome open-mindedness here. Not only are the modern-dance Ms. Sheu and the ballerina Ms. Whelan presented as equals, but the bare foot is also made to look at least as interesting as the point shoe. Mr. Wheeldon’s duets are always theatrically effective; Mr. Hall has a duet with Ms. Sheu that wins as much as applause as does Ms. Whelan’s with Mr. Angle.

The repeated quartet earned the least response, but even when seen only once, it is the section whose structural intricacy extends Mr. Wheeldon most as a dance maker. Its cool complexity — four people dancing different phrases at the same time, all satisfyingly studded with absorbing detail — makes it compelling on each viewing.

The irresistible ingredient of the “Shutters Shut” duet, choreographed by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León, is its score, Gertrude Stein’s recording of “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1912); its meters, repetitions, half-rhymes all dryly turn speech into dance music. The accompanying Lightfoot-León choreography is good camp fun. Man and woman, wearing strong facial makeup and near identical attire, face front throughout, and the mood is that of a cheekily absurdist Tweedledum-Tweedledee routine. The dance follows Stein’s meters but without her entrancing wit or fluent brio.

In an introductory video, the founding dance duo of BalletBoyz — the former Royal Ballet principals Michael Nunn and William Trevitt — talk of how they, retired from the stage, are now passing on their skills to a new generation, but their charm, which is considerable, bleeds here into the cheesy. And the dance that follows is more mood than substance. An isolated backbend is used now and then, apparently to indicate existential anguish.

When together, the men, some occasionally wearing hoodies, do virile routines and take turns throwing themselves at one another. It’s forgettable — but, like so much Fall for Dance fare, it enlarges our picture of dance today.