Apparently, and understandably, it can sometimes wear on the dancers, keeping the loss of their choreographer in a sort of eternal present tense.
This season the festival, held at Dance New Amsterdam, presents more than 40 companies and choreographers in a sort of intergenerational free-for-all.
A giant map at the show's entrance illustrates the connections among all the players — painters, sculptors, poets, composers, musicians, choreographers and dancers — sort of like the art world's own social network well before it was technological reality.
The show is the brainchild of choreographer Kathleen Howard.
Robert Weiss, the director of the two-year-old Carolina Ballet, and the choreographer once envisioned "Carmina Burana" as "sort of a live 'Fantasia,' " he said.
There are ways to really sort of fuse these elements of collaboration to draw nuances, and if a choreographer comes in and says "I want to dance in a train station," I don't want to limit that at all.
A different sort of energy settled into the theater briefly with "Angelitos Negros," a serpentine, ritualistic solo (from "Songs of the Disinherited," 1972) by the resident choreographer Donald McKayle.
According to choreographer Kenny Ortega, who spoke towards the end of the service, he had come to regard the auditorium as a sort of home.
