New York Knickknacks

For the third year in a row, I attended the Spring is Blooming festival on Mother’s Day. Thanks to Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet, in place of crowded, overpriced brunches, I now look forward to a public dance spectacle, bougie swag, and the delightful camouflaging of the concrete jungles of midtown with pop-art flowers, pastel gazebos, and lazy bench swings. This year, the festival took over the Rockefeller Center campus, utilizing the Today Show Plaza for events and the summer rink and channel garden areas for the distribution of chocolate chip cookies from Café d’Avignon, bottles of passion fruit iced tea, pinwheels, and sleeves of tulips the size of sushi hand rolls. To procure some of the free stuff, one had to gather wooden coins with flowers printed on them from friendly, apron-clad workers floating about the plazas. Why? I have no idea. Perhaps because it was quaint and fun to drop the coins in the slotted boxes at each stand.

Performance

“A Dance for Two” by Benjamin Millepied

Place

Spring is Blooming festival, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, Rockefeller Center, New York, NY, May 12, 2025

Words

Faye Arthurs

Daisy Jacobson in “A Dance for Two” by Benjamin Millepied. Photograph courtesy of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

Yet, as in past years, amidst all the whimsy there was some seriously good art. Through May 29th, three gigantic John Chamberlain sculptures made from colorful aluminum foil—Fiddlersfortune (Pink) (2010), Balmywisecrack (Copper) (2010), and Ritzfrolic (Green) (2008)—are making their U.S. debut on the Central Plaza. On weekends throughout May, the Guggenheim and the American Academy of Poets join forces to present poetry readings. The New York Academy of Art holds live painting events. And the VC&A Dance Reflections team curates quality dance performances. In late May, Cassiel Gaube’s “Soiree D’Etudes” is on offer. In early May, including the show I caught, Benjamin Millepied’s brand new “A Dance for Two” ran twice a day.

The two of the title were Daisy Jacobson and Jobel Medina, both exquisite movers who have history with the choreographer. Jacobson used to be a member of Millepied’s troupe, the L.A. Dance Project, before joining Twyla Tharp’s recent tours. Medina was with Ate9 Dance, and, like Jacobson, he worked with Millepied on “Grace, Jeff Buckley Dances” at La Seine Musicale in Paris last fall. It was a treat to see these fabulous dancers up close. Both were at home in Millepied’s propulsive style, a ballet/contemporary fusion which I always think resembles a basketball game without a ball. Millepied loves dekes and stutter steps, and he often employs tiny weight shifts that erupt in big movements in surprising directions. Like Alexei Ratmanksy, he’s partial to the low sauté devant step. But where Ratmansky often pairs the move with a torso leaning over the extended leg and arms in a wilted fourth position, Millepied likes a torso slightly tipped away from the gestural leg and a sharp, cross-body diagonal arm line.

Daisy Jacobson and Jobel Medina in “A Dance for Two” by Benjamin Millepied. Photograph courtesy of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

Diagonals were key to “A Dance for Two.” The score was a recording of Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices,” an a cappella composition performed by Roomful of Teeth. It began with directional banter that resembled a mashup between an oral math quiz and square dance calling. A male voice mentioned “a red diagonal line from the lower left corner toward the upper right corner.” Jacobson sported just such an arrangement as she stood still in an asymmetrically draped crimson top and matching pants, ignoring all the introductory commands. Medina’s all black costume was also cut along the bias, with one diagonal of fabric slung across his chest like a sash. The geometric yet flowy costumes were by the minimalist French label Gauchère.

The music and choreography maintained as tight a tension between sharpness and fluidity as the costumes. The singers went back and forth between humming, spiritual chanting, and staccato breathwork that was borderline simian at times. The dancing too contrasted frozen poses with liquid arabesque turns and slides. Medina gently pushed the inside of his elbows to initiate a rippling jellyfish effect. Both dancers repeated a tender wrapping motif, in which they collapsed and spirally hugged themselves. But they also engaged in stiff, semaphore-like port de bras as well. Sometimes they stood one in front of the other with arms jutting out like a four-armed Buddha statue.

The passersby on the plaza were similarly stop and go, as tourists paused to take in some of the dance and then meandered away. Millepied wrote of this commission: "New York is a city that has shaped me as an artist—its energy, history, movement. To present at Rockefeller Center, a landmark deeply woven into the city’s rhythm, is an honor. Dance belongs in spaces where people gather, where movement echoes life.” He achieved his aim, as the dancing mirrored the pedestrians’ alternate loitering and bustle.

Jobel Medina in “A Dance for Two” by Benjamin Millepied. Photograph courtesy of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

What made this dance truly profound, however, was the lighting. I caught a 3pm showing, so I can’t speak to any sundial effects at the noon shows, but by the late-afternoon an ever-encroaching diagonal shaft of light filtered through the skyscrapers onto the stage floor, wondrously echoing the hypotenuse theme present in the music, the choreography, and the costuming. The dancers were uncannily involved with the light’s journey throughout the piece, as when Jacobson moved up and down along the corridor of light with variations on the skipping sauté.

The glowing channel crept steadily upstage during the half-hour long dance, until it transformed from a pathway into a bisecting line, with the top triangle of the stage fully sunlit and the bottom triangle cast in complete shadow. The work ended with the dancers on either side of this demarcation, breaking them and the stage into a naturally occurring yin/yang symbol. The effect was both mathematical and godly. To the singers’ exalted aaahing, the pair took hands across the boundary, raised them up together, then let them part and fall as they stood on opposite sides of the divide. Implausibly, the best lighting design I’ve seen in ages can be credited to the natural tilt and rotation of the Earth in conjunction with the gap between 10 Rockefeller Center and the Nintendo Store.

“A Dance for Two” was intended to be viewed in the round, but the biggest crowd formed between the Chamberlain sculptures and the makeshift stage, which made the New York Gifts souvenir shop along 48th Street (featuring giant signage lettering with a heart instead of an “O” in York and a Statue of Liberty instead of an “I” in the word Gifts) into an ironically ideal backdrop. Keychains and tchotchkes be damned, miraculous New York moments like this are the city’s real gifts.

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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