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On Criticism

On rare occasions, a dance seems to speak directly to me—often to my experiences as a dancer, sometimes to my humanity. Yet, prior to the world premiere of Pony Cam’s “kinda like that,” never has a dance made me feel seen as a critic. Was it even a dance? Pony Cam is an experimental theater collective from Australia, not a dance troupe. The five clever members—Claire Bird, Ava Campbell, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub, and Hugo Williams—emerged in front of the curtain to sheepishly preface their endeavor: “We never made a dance show before. This is our first time.” What a cheeky way to open the fifth and final program of the 2026 Fall for Dance Festival. Naturally, it got a huge laugh.

Performance

Fall for Dance Festival, Program 4: Pony Cam's “kinda like that” / Miami City Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Roses from the South: Three Waltzes for Toby” / The Australian Ballet in Stephanie Lake's “Seven Days”

Place

New York City Center, New York, NY, October 2026

Words

Faye Arthurs

Pony Cam's “kinda like that.” Photograph by Steven Pisano

Incidentally, “What is a dance?” was one of their piece’s central questions. (It is also a query that comes up frequently in my line of work.) As Pony Cam further explained to the crowd, they approached this commission with copious curiosity and research. They watched every Fall for Dance dance they could (22 years’ worth!), and their plan was to build their first-ever dance from bits of every single FFD piece to date. Thus, “kinda like that” was a collage, a summary, and a spoof. I’m still not sure if it was a dance or not, but it was a balm to my soul.

“Everything you are about to see has happened on this stage before” was their ingeniously anticlimactic announcement before disappearing behind the curtain. Seconds later, they started with the iconic backwards opening lineup of Balanchine’s “Agon.” The names of legendary choreographers represented at past festivals flashed across the backdrop as the cast cycled through hilarious imitations. The easiest choreographers to lampoon were the ones who invented styles: Paul Taylor (chest-led running, sautés, and baseball slides with giant grins) and Martha Graham (childbirth squats in long gowns).

Pony Cam took breaks from specific dancemaker parodies to send up larger FFDF trends, all of which had me nodding vigorously in my seat. As a metronome ticked, they explained how the music selections are “often as simple as a metronome, but most often a re-composition of Bach.” Then one member of the troupe shone a flashlight on another who sat at a piano and played the Aria da Capo from “The Goldberg Variations” in the dark, just as Simone Dinnerstein had done for Pam Tanowitz’s “New Work for Goldberg Variations” (which was listed, with the numerous other works to Bach scores, among the supertitles). Pony Cam’s point was driven home at the end of the show, when Stephanie Lake’s “Seven Days” reworked “The Goldberg Variations” to death. Also just last week, when Akram Kahn’s “Vertical Road (Reimagined) 2023” employed a steady beat for a mind-numbing eternity.      

Pony Cam recreated a few dances faithfully, like Trisha Brown’s “Spanish Steps,” because, as they archly confessed, “this piece made us reconsider what we thought dance could be.” Indeed, Brown’s goofy conga train resembles what very drunk people might converge upon naturally at a tiki bar. Along similar lines, they enlisted the audience to recreate Charles Moulton’s “Precision Ball Passing.” Like Brown’s facile grooving, Pony Cam thought this work—in which ever larger groups of people (up to 72!) pass balls back and forth—was overly basic. But then they tried it, and they found it to be incredibly hard to do with just the five of them (as the sections of the crowd with red balls on their seats soon discovered).

Pony Cam in “kinda like that.” Photograph by Steven Pisano

Pony Cam in “kinda like that.” Photograph by Steven Pisano

These passages brought up a salient point about the relationship between technical difficulty and artistry: how they can, but do not necessarily, go together. An art world adage applies to the Moulton experiment: “anyone who has ever looked at a Jackson Pollock and thought, “my kid could do that,” probably hasn’t tried it.” And, for art that is easily replicable, timing is everything. Brown was one of the first modern choreographers to contextualize pedestrian movements as art. As in dadaism, zeitgeist is paramount: it can be brave and brilliant for an artist to spotlight the aesthetics of the everyday—as in Marcel Duchamp’s repurposing of a urinal in “Fountain”—or it can be a cheesy copout. You can’t get famous for painting soup can labels after Warhol.                      

The same fine line applies to nudity in art, as Pony Cam demonstrated in a slomo stripping sequence. “Sometimes,” Strom enthused, “the best thing about the dances is the dances are shirtless.” All five removed their tops to operatic chanting, enhaloed in individual spotlights. Then the women faced backwards and painstakingly took off their bras before slowly pivoting to the front, their arms low in mountain pose, their faces beatific. This blend of burlesque and religious ecstasy was hysterical, and apt. Dance—like classical sculpture—is partly a celebration of the human form. But when does toplessness evoke reverence and when is it vulgar?

Every audience member gets to draw these lines for themselves, of course, but it is a critic’s job to draw them as accurately as possible across a wide swath of examples. Fallible as they may be, critics are the front line in the arbitration of profundity verses gimmickry. When Pony Cam claimed they had also read every FFDF review in the New York Times, the crowd snickered. (FFDF audiences are known for their unbridled enthusiasm, how dare critics yuck their yum!) And yet, the last word in “kinda like that” was given to a Times reviewer. Since one FFDF piece, Eiko and Koma’s “Snow,” was never recorded, Pony Cam could not physically quote it. Instead, Bird read Jack Anderson’s awed account of it, which was quite impactful, because when someone who is paid to see and evaluate everything has been stirred, that praise is sacred.

Surprisingly, what began as an affectionate satire of a festival ended as a love letter to criticism. This undanced ending was also a smart commentary on how watching a recording of a dance cannot compare to the experience of live theater. But a review is always an eyewitness account of an isolated moment—an attempt to frame a work of art within the time of its creation, or as its import shifts over time. The best reviews are investigative, descriptive, comprehensive, and contextual—while also acknowledging the quirks of the reviewer’s own lens. Pony Cam’s “kinda like that” did all those things. Perhaps it was a dance; it was definitely a critique. And a damn good one.

Miami City Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky's “Roses from the South: Three Waltzes for Toby.” Photograph by Steven Pisano

Miami City Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky's “Roses from the South: Three Waltzes for Toby.” Photograph by Steven Pisano

So, in weighing the next dance, the Miami City Ballet’s rendition of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Roses from the South: Three Waltzes for Toby,” I’ll follow Pony Cam’s lead and clarify my vantage point. I am by no means a Ratmansky completist, but I bring 21 years of viewership (I first saw his work when the Bolshoi Ballet brought “The Bright Stream” to the Met in 2005), as well as several years of watching him create in the studio and dancing in a few of his works for the New York City Ballet. In general, I am a fan who has frequently been moved to tears by his ballets, yet I have shrugged my shoulders at others while still admiring their craftsmanship. I take that all into consideration before disclosing that, of all the Ratmansky ballets I’ve seen, I liked “Roses” the least.  

However, in this unusual case, I am not the intended audience. “Roses” is a rare tribute ballet, made in honor of MCB founder Toby Lerner Ansin on his 85th birthday. I know nothing about Ansin, so I have no idea if the odd vignettes that were baffling to me were meaningful to him: as when one dancer shirked his partnering duties to meditate in a corner. Is Ansin an equestrian? Why else was there so much horseback riding mime spliced into the ballroom dancing? Ratmansky is famous for his mini characterizations within larger non-narrative works, but in “Roses,” these sketches seemed like inside jokes rather than relatable foibles.

I also do not know why Ratmansky selected some of Johan Strauss II’s schmaltziest waltzes for this piece, or if Moritz Junge’s one-shouldered, pastel, 80s prom gowns were meant to evoke Miami vibes earnestly or ironically. But I found everything to be overly tacky without enough winking acknowledgment. The main problem with “Roses,” however, was that its high degree of technical difficulty fought against its syrupiness. Ratmansky is known for challenging his dancers, but “Roses” may be his hardest dance to date. There were tandem à la seconde pirouette competitions between the sexes, group fouetté/arabesque turn combos with corner-changing spotting, and the craziest en dedans turn I’ve ever seen, in which fouettés relevé were strung together by hiccup hops through passé (kind of like a jumped Italian fouetté). These steps would be hard enough to pull off solo, but they were nearly impossible to sync up, especially because the large cast of sixteen was extremely varied in size and shape. (Taller people turn at much slower rates than shorter ones, and pointe shoes provide much less friction than ballet slippers.)

Even some of the solo passages were practically undanceable, like an attitude balance on pointe, head tilted down, held for a freakishly long time (it didn’t happen). A dancer would be lucky to hit that once in a lifetime, let alone in every performance. Maybe the contrast of the ballet’s imperfectability with its candied packaging was the joke? That is a funny idea, one that furthers Pony Cam’s investigation of technicality vs artistry. But it would’ve landed better if the dancers appeared to be having more fun. This is a troupe that attacks Balanchine, no holds barred, yet every time a clump of them planted in square fourth positions in “Roses” they looked slightly terrified, understandably. (Random bouts of panic were also among the acted vignettes.) Thus, the company looked more tense than usual, though they did a valiant job overall. Hannah Fischer and Stanislav Olshanskyi sold their tough stuff the best.  

The Australian Ballet in “Seven Days” by Stephanie Lake. Photograph by Steven Pisano

The Australian Ballet in “Seven Days” by Stephanie Lake. Photograph by Steven Pisano

Though I didn’t really like this piece, I still marveled at the integrity of its construction. I often think of Ratmansky ballets in the same way I think about Wes Anderson films. Both men have singular visions that they execute in painstaking detail. Sometimes I find the specificity transcendent, sometimes twee. But at least their works are always unique. Pony Cam’s promise, “everything you are about to see has happened on this stage before,” did not apply here. Ratmansky’s technical twists and bizarro pantomime were wholly original.

The same cannot be said of Lake’s “Seven Days,” performed by the Australian Ballet. Though this was the ballet’s US premiere, I felt like I’d seen it all before (much of it earlier that evening, in their compatriots’ rundown of FFDF fads). The Bach, the chairs, the spazzy gestures, the slides in socks, the creepy mincing, the squats, the fake laughing—yawn. But even in these pretentiously tweaky moves, you could tell that these dancers were seriously good. They had energy, musicality, control, and sculpted lines. As it happens, a few of them were topless, which further showcased their chiseled musculature. I’d like to see them dance something—anything—else. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the troupe’s run of Christopher Wheeldon’s full-length “Oscar” ballet at City Center over the next long holiday weekend.)  As it was, I thought again of Pony Cam’s wise words: “sometimes, the best thing about the dances is the dances are shirtless.”      

Faye Arthurs

Faye Arthurs is a former ballet dancer with New York City Ballet. She chronicled her time as a professional dancer in her blog Thoughts from the Paint. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English from Fordham University. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their sons.

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