The grisly comeuppance of a capitalist exploiter of the working class. A poignant yet majestic rite of passage. A stylized evocation of sexual desire. More than 50 years after the death of José Limón, his company continues to gift classics from his modern dance repertory to a new generation of dancers, sometimes reframed in a modern context, and to invite new dancemakers into the conversation.
Limón Dance Company's 80th anniversary season kicked off with Chaconne, a solo of grave beauty, set to the immortal final movement of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin. 22 bodies – not a corps de ballet honed to a uniform precision, but a multigenerational cohort of dancers – turned the solo into a social dance, a communion. Not everyone needed to hold a balance on one leg, not everyone spun like a helicopter and not everyone got down on the floor on one knee. But everyone understood the assignment: the generous open positions of the body; spiraling tilts of the torso; collarbones lifted to the sky; the air carved decisively by softly rounded arms that turned in when lifted, so that the backs of the hands faced each other in witty riposte to the classical port de bras.
Those who caught my eye included Daniel Fetecua Soto who threw himself with abandon into off-kilter spins. Nina Watt, who was with the company in Limón’s time, flaunted a regal carriage perfectly matched with Bach. Lauren Twomley sailed through the air with unruffled calm. Savannah Spratt spun as tightly as a figure skater.
The dance lost some of its enchantment with violinist John Marcus relegated to the stalls at the lip of the stage. Though real estate was tight, he should have been among the dancers, in visible dialogue with them.
If you just emerged from monastic seclusion you might have missed the connection between The Emperor Jones and the current occupant of the White House. In the Eugene O’Neill play, a criminal fugitive from a chain gang establishes himself as a despot on a Caribbean island. In his 1956 adaptation, Limón made a vehicle for himself as the thundering anti-hero Brutus Jones. Jones was a Black character but Limón’s Indigenous Mexican and European ancestry conferred a racial fluidity that enabled him to portray figures of various ethnicities. Jones was in a sinister alliance with a schemer whom O’Neill labeled ‘a Cockney Trader’ and Limón called ‘The Man in White.’
This latest reconstruction retains Limón’s choreography but abandons the racial tensions and the spectre of Jim Crow for a setting defined by skyscrapers and unhappy corporate drones in suits and ties who are plotting to overthrow the rapacious and increasingly unhinged emperor, now some sort of venture capitalist. Johnson Guo danced him as a preening, vengeful yet cowardly nepo baby, hunkered down in a comically oversized leather office chair, a holstered pistol dangling between his legs like a codpiece. Joey Columbus gave a dynamite performance as the loathsome Man in White.
Among Limón’s signature strokes in works like this and The Moor’s Pavane, were these combative pairings of powerful, flawed male figures – in The Emperor Jones, their interactions were all whipping legs and tortured twists of the hips, more than fleetingly homoerotic. The terrific ensemble, once all-male, now mixed-gender, slithered and exploded in pitchfork fury, seemingly impelled by the same primal forces as Paul Taylor’s men in white tie and tails in Cloven Kingdom.
The Emperor Jones explored the sordid back rooms of American capitalism while Diego Vega Solorza’s new Jamelgos conjured a shadowy dreamworld populated by six dancers identically costumed like a fantasy of the Praetorian guard in leather helmets with horsehair tails, and very little else, all in leather. Horse imagery abounded, linking this piece to an earlier multimedia work by Vega Solorza called Basoteve, a rendering of the artist’s personal experience of shame during a coming-of-age ritual in rural Mexico in which young boys are placed on a horse and expected to emulate traditional notions of masculinity.
The splendid lighting scheme by Corey Whittemore did a lot of the heavy lifting in this piece, highlighting naked musculature, gleaming skin, and the flicking action of silvery horsehair tails. From the stunning visuals it seemed clear that the heralded Mexican choreographer aimed to create a new language of desire, mining the culture of horsemen like the vaqueros and charros while rejecting old gender binaries. But with the action confined to a clichéd slow-mo and staccato pulses like electric shocks, the new language barely evolved. A final group clinch harked back to the hallucinatory cluster of the ensemble in The Emperor Jones as they prepared to eviscerate the hapless emperor. Somehow it lacked the power of that scene, despite the extended bit of strobe lighting for drama.
