This odd scene was part of the Fifth Avenue Blooms festival supported by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels. For the third year in a row, the haute joaillerie house has commissioned outdoor modern dance performances and immersive floral experiences along 5th Ave during the month of May. VC&A has again enlisted artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet to design it. The installation runs for about ten blocks and includes pastel garden swings and cartoonish, flower-festooned benches. At night, these booths are artfully lit. Some old-timey carts doled out individually wrapped tulips, others handed out coffee. My kids flocked to the stools on one bedecked platform and a photographer snapped a polaroid of them and handed it to us in a trademarked sleeve. Then they were given trademarked pinwheels for the road. Everything was free.   

Last year, I saw a Pam Tanowitz piece at the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. This year, the companies invited to perform in the midtown floral wonderland were the Trisha Brown Dance Company and Némo Flouret. At noon and 2pm on rotating weekends, they took over the atrium adjacent to the Chippendale building, between 5th and Madison avenues. I caught the TBDC’s offering, cutely titled “Trisha Brown: In Plain Site.” This half hour of programming included two dances from the ’70s: “Locus” and “Group Primary Accumulation.” To adapt these pieces for the unforgiving cement setting, four square, wooden platforms were arranged on the diagonal. Each square was large enough for one performer to lie on comfortably, as the quartet did in “Group.” In “Locus,” the same one-person-per-platform rule applied, however, there were two more dancers than there were platforms. Substitutes tapped in and out of the dance, waiting on the sidelines after their shifts.