50 years ago a girl ran to catch a bus and choreographer Paul Taylor, witnessing the moment, turned it into a dance in five movements. To mark this milestone in the history of the national treasure known as Esplanade, the Paul Taylor Dance Company will be making a suitable splash come November at New York’s Lincoln Center. However, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company has beat them to it.
For a company of 17 dancers in a Rust Belt city, Dayton maintains an impressively large tent. Among modern dance companies committed to portraying the African American experience through dance, Dayton may have the broadest repertory – housing work by Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, Eleo Pomare, Bill T. Jones, Merce Cunningham and Doug Varone, to name a few.
That tent just got bigger with the addition of Esplanade, making Dayton the first African American dance company to perform this classic. Having danced it twice at home, they brought it to New York’s Joyce Theater this week.
Bach violin concertos steer the piece from carefree and reckless to sombre and mournful. These dancers haven’t quite nailed the carefree quality, perhaps concentrating on the deceptively complex walking, running, pivoting and skipping patterns. But they were fearless when it came to the madcap crashes to the floor and the hurtling through space into the arms of a distant partner. Countess V. Winfrey in pink slayed the tricky skittering solo in the fourth movement, as if blown about by a gale.
In quieter moments, dramatic qualities in the movement were splendidly drawn out in ways that I’m not used to seeing in Taylor company performances. The commanding Robert Pulido carved the air in the first movement with a grave elegance. I was riveted by the tender yet mysterious exchanges between Edgar Kawoq Aguirre and Alexandria “Peach” Flewellen in the fourth movement. And by the enigmatic mother figure embodied with magnificent serenity by Qarrianne Blayr. When the ensemble crawl into a huddle around her, heads bowed, they accent the movement slightly so that each forward drag is followed by a fleeting pause. This stylization of the crawl adds tension to the already disquieting imagery.
While Esplanade may still be taking shape in this company, the revival of Jacob’s Ladder, Rennie Harris’ 2006 riff on the work of painter Jacob Lawrence, is a fully realised triumph. Lawrence was a prolific chronicler of African American life. Harris is a renowned street dance historian and a pioneer creator of hip hop concert dance works. In Lawrence’s art, themes of migration, racial conflict, the impact of war and industrialization on ordinary people’s lives were depicted in an angular, Cubist-influenced construction. Sometimes what he left out of a minimalist piece creates the emotional power; at other times chaos is the point. His disjointed human figures often present in an exaggerated lunge, or slumped or tipped at a precarious angle, suffused with energy.
Harris works with a tightly disciplined vocabulary, chaos forever lurking at the edges. He ships his dancers onstage in deep lunges then has them trace huge arcs in the air, as if mapping a course across perilous terrain. They spring up repeatedly as if startled by a series of loud noises, like gunfire, their upper bodies slouched forward. Zap Mama’s bewitching, tremulous Afrofunk sound embedded in a charged sonic landscape by Darrin Ross sparks a frenzy of virtuosic popping.
Striking contrasts are set up between groups of dancers whose feet are firmly planted, knees swivelling, bodies quaking, and others who cut paths through the landscape with razor-sharp footwork. Episodes of exaggerated slow-motion travel, as if underwater, emphasise the rigour of the journey, and in one of many witty moments, a bunch of dancers fall on their sides, furiously pedalling imaginary bikes. A formidable quartet of Winfrey, Blayr, Allyia Nelloms and Sadale Warner step in to lead the way. Not content to travel by road, Aaron J. Frisby takes to the air in a series of buoyant leaps. The end of the journey is marked by a ritual of deep exhales.
For this revival, Harris has elected to leave out the projections of Lawrence’s work from the original production. While the dance creates its own dazzling representation of Black urban life, it has lost a singular opportunity to be in conversation with Jacob Lawrence’s art.
In a flimsy bit of programming, the evening opened with a Ray Mercer work that looked like an escapee from a Broadway musical. A dramatic solo turn by Devin Baker as a tormented artist provided momentary respite from long stretches of turned-in pirouettes and pointless acrobatic partnering. The accompanying muzak – blamed on five composers who must’ve all gone to the same school – was no help. Neither were the Joyce’s tinny acoustics which did an equal disservice to Bach and Zap Mama. These terrific dancers deserved better.
