I can’t report on the acoustics because I went there yesterday for the English National Ballet, in town for a limited run --  they usually tour the land wherever railroads can take them (think Swan Lake in Bradford and Hull).

And the object of such anticipation? The Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadére, recently performed by the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center.

Creating its own kind of Wonderland, Momix calls for all manner of shifts—both physical and mental. Ninety minutes of shape shifting to amorphous music and distorted nature images could be a recipe for disaster. Luckily, the closest Momix comes to a resounding “off with its head” is over-saturation, thanks to the extreme technical prowess of the dancers and the whimsicality of each set of movements.

At times, the fluid, sensual, often humorous movements get lost amid a sea of recurring if not repetitive circles, parallelograms and Kabuki-like “puppetry.”

Akram Khan, a choreographer whose vision is both grounded and deliciously stratospheric, engages this challenge head on, face forward, toes poised to the next tine of an already thin rope in each of his two evening-length pieces, Bahok and Zero Degrees, recently performed at New York’s City Center.

Set in a fictitious transportation hub whose information board cycles through symbols and a series of frustrating edicts and subtitled translations, Bahok weaves Khan’s quietly violent movement and exquisitely abstracted score (composed by Nitin Sawhney) with his keen eye for the delicate intricacies of human behavior, speech and rhythm. Zero Degrees takes a more minimalist but no less effect approach, chronicling the struggles and discovery of two dancers experimenting with their relationship to each other, space and themselves.  

Moving among and between a set depicting an active photo studio, complete with tripods, reflective umbrellas, video screens and costume racks, a trio of dancers (Holley Farmer, Rashaun Mitchell and Banu Ogan, like Mr. Bokaer, formerly of the Merce Cunnigham Dance Company) sporting sequins and nautical-inspired dinner jackets designed by Isaac Mizrahi, and moving to punctuating music that almost sounds like the inner workings of a photo development machine, interact in near perfect disillusionment that there is anyone else on the stage but them. It is not so much narcissism as a complete lack of emotional interaction between counterparts that leave the piece feeling cold and unconnected.

In the past works that I have seen, there is nothing that stirs in me that visceral internal furnace that signals the ignition of something explosive—something that resonates with the core of my being and awakens the dormant morsels of past experience. My eyes have feasted, but I am left feeling hollow. While his work has great substance, his particular flavors haven’t excited my palate and nourished my hunger in a way that has felt satisfying…until now.

Garth Fagan’s foray into fantasy, in a collaboration with jazz legend Wynton Marsalis and sculptor Martin Puryear, sets the bar high, promising originality and an exuberant dance language born of a rare fusion of African, Caribbean, modern and ballet disciplines. Stravinsky aficionados will find music set ablaze as Heddy Maalem’s fourteen dancers hailing from across the African continent re-imagine The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) in a combination of effervescent movement and the striking imagery of filmmaker Benoit Dervaux.