Although the direct imitation of some of Glass’s rhythms gets a little clomping, the tapping and turning work well. At one point, Sandoval offers a Charleston-like kicking that can cause you to hear the music differently, a choreographic revelation. And his response to the étude’s typically unresolved ending is witty: He slips and falls and doesn’t get back up.
Lucinda Childs, whose piece comes last, represents an opposite pole of fidelity. Her version of Etude No. 18, a duet performed by Caitlin Scranton and Kyle Gerry, is a Platonic ideal of dancing to Glass. It might feel that way partly because Childs has been choreographing to his music for nearly 50 years. (“Dance,” her 1979 collaboration with the composer, opened the Dance Reflections festival in October.) But it’s also true that they are stylistic soul mates.
In silky pajamas, Scranton and Gerry spin side by side, or she around him. They hold hands courteously and stretch slightly away from each other, barely intimating an emotional connection. Childs honors Glass’s structure by repeating her own choreography, reversing its direction. Like Glass, she believes in repetition.
Between these poles, the other choreographers don’t fare as well. Justin Peck hears the one-note woodpeckering of Etude No. 6 as anxiety; a solo dancer in sneakers, doubled over on a stool, expands outward in an untangling of emotion and then collapses back. Patricia Delgado, whom I saw dance this on Thursday, is always lovely, but the concept is poor in imagination.
Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, lithely crouching and rising through their own choreography, interpret Etude No. 8 as the dance of a troubled couple. Schraiber amazes with his mercurial flow, packing many colors into a burst of motion, but the concept, like Peck’s, is too commonplace. Similarly, Chanon Judson gorgeously stretches her long limbs through Etude No. 11 — shaking, shadowboxing, smiling, without revealing anything new in the music.
