French artist Charlotte Gastaut trimmed this sunken plaza with a very different kind of vegetation. She created beautiful prints of flowers and butterflies based on the delicate silks of 18th century French court dresses. Perhaps some fans will purchase a matching VC&A watch, for $100,000, or a papillon necklace, for $22,000? The rest of us could at least enjoy the fancy freebies. My Kindergartner and I whiled away the first Sunday of May in this floral wonderland, lazily swinging on a bench while sipping flavored iced teas, watching artists from the New York Academy of Art paint at easels lining the Channel Gardens, and coloring in a pretty book featuring Gastuat’s blooms. We also caught a lively children’s storybook reading by Amelie Gaulier and two world-class modern dance performances.

Pam Tanowitz is no stranger to the bloom festival, and this year VC&A commissioned her to make a site-specific piece. “Untitled (Romance for Rockefeller Center),” was way more fanciful than most Tanowitz dances. Two musicians—the clarinetist Eric Schultz and the trumpeter Aidan Peterson—were casually perched along the sidelines, breaking into spontaneous jams as if in a romcom fantasy sequence. They even warbled “La Vie En Rose” at one point. Longtime Tanowitz dancer Maile Okamura designed flower-printed costumes that almost matched Gastaut’s surrounding butterfly jungle. She clad dancer Christine Flores in a ruffled tennis skirt, a remarkably frilly look for Tanowitz’s oeuvre. And the dance ended on an exaggeratedly romantic note, with Anson Zwingelberg pulling a flower from a planter and presenting it to Okamura.  

But Tanowitz had not exactly gone sappy. Her signature archness came through in every step. She pointedly contrasted the glorious (Zachary Gonder and Marc Crousillat parading Okamura around in an arabesque press lift) with the awkward (Flores hoisted aloft in a sideways non-position). The latter lift closely resembled Paul Manship’s gilded bronze Prometheus sculpture looming above the makeshift stage, calling attention to how actively—and unusually—posed it is. 

Likewise, Peterson’s heraldic bursts jived nicely with Gastaut’s perimeter of fleur flags flapping in the wind. Yet the trumpeting also highlighted the incessant cacophony of traffic. And like the Rockettes, whose home base is nearby, Tanowitz had her cast line up on a diagonal and perform angular moves in a jagged sort of kick line. In their green and pink flower camo, together they resembled a thorny stem with a bloom—a giant, “Little Shop of Horrors” kind of rose.              

Most of all, Tanowitz’s deadpan, impulsive movements echoed the random busyness of the world all around. Why did her dancers hold imaginary beach balls in fourth positions for a while before breaking into odd skitters, bourrées, or bent over emboîtés? For the same reason that the flags would flap furiously in the wind, then hang limp. Or that the sun shone bright and warm, then clouds passed and it became momentarily chilly. For the same reason that a woman wandered into the back of the set and sat on a flowery bench, completely oblivious to the fact that she was onstage. Or perhaps for the same reason that two spectators territorially defended a whole row of seating in the crowded audience area—as if they were diehard fans—then abandoned the show altogether as soon as their full party arrived a few minutes into the ballet. The last Tanowitz dance I saw was “Pastoral,” and this one could have been called “Rock Center Pastoral,” as it was so reflective of the whims of the tourists and the spring weather.