Tom's Life Bits

July 19, 2007

Dance Review | American Dance Festival

Lines of Shuffling Bodies Pulse With Life and History

By JENNIFER DUNNING

DURHAM, N.C., July 18 — How very new the old can look, and how persistent good ideas may be. That was the message of “Past/Forward,” presented on Tuesday night at the American Dance Festival at Duke University here, and in particular of “How Long Brethren?,” a 1937 dance by Helen Tamiris. In this reconstruction by Dianne McIntyre, a choreographer in her own right and a Tamiris specialist, “Brethren” is an extraordinarily powerful experience. A dance of social protest, it works not only as an indictment of inhuman conditions suffered by Southern rural blacks of the time, but also as starkly minimalist abstract movement.

Tamiris, who died in 1966, was a pioneering modern-dance choreographer of the second generation of innovators that included Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. “Brethren” was created for the W.P.A. Federal Theater and Dance Project and restaged for the Federal Theater Project program of George Mason University in 1991. No films or notes survived from the original. Ms. McIntyre worked from photographs, which were all that remained, along with the score and costumes. She found four members of the original cast, and together they brought “Brethren” back to life.

And life pushes out of the piece’s shuffling, leaping, milling formations of 15 women, clothed in drab homespun field-workers’ dresses. Set to traditional songs of Southern laborers performed on tape and live by Mavis Kashanda Poole and Ariane Reinhart, the dance’s seven “episodes” make their effect through lines of women, bodies pressed tight, and individuals who become sculptural totems as they slip away from the trudging, propulsive flow. The traveling bodies, hunched yet quick to spring, were startlingly different from today’s lithe uprightness and made these dancers’ accomplishment all the more impressive.

The striking visuals — the softly geometric juxtapositions, arms raised and reaching like silent cries, black-and-white striped fabric stretched across rounded hips in one episode, and gray box pedestals — are all of their time, recalling similar effects in dances by Graham and Humphrey. But “Brethren” pulses with distilled history in its suggestions of killing work that fails to sustain life, of grinning minstrel-show exuberance and of hope and despair.

The soloists — Meagan Bruskewicz and Candace Thompson — serve as solitary embodiments of those emotions, with the effect of almost churchly call and response.

The program’s revival of Laura Dean’s 1982 “Sky Light,” in an exciting reconstruction by Rodger Belman, was another triumph. Set to drum music by Ms. Dean, who appears to have settled into near-retirement in North Carolina, “Sky Light” is also a classic in danger of being lost. It is pure, heady Dean: a thing of fast-footed shifts of rank and travel, of hypnotic spinning and of in-place dips and tilts by spotlighted individuals with every part of the body, including the mid-torso, working to full capacity. The mesmerizing beauty of the dance lies largely in its repetitions and in the ways it breaks from them.

Here, as throughout the evening, the performers were young dancers enrolled in the festival’s training program. These six — Andrew Champlin, Hsiao-Jung Huang, Meghan Milam, Matthew Reeves, Hsiao Tzu Tien and the warmly authoritative Domingo Estrada Jr. — were miracles of focus, clarity and endurance. The drummers were Jason Cirker and Matt Spataro.

Rudy Perez’s new “I Like a View but I Like to Sit With My Back to It,” a festival commission, suffered from its placement after “Brethren” and perhaps from its very large cast and expansive vision. Mr. Perez, who moved to Los Angeles in 1978, was one of the great minimalist performers and choreographers of avant-garde dance in New York in the 1960s and ’70s. You could see that power in sections of “View,” but it was diluted not only by the size of the 21-member cast but also by the number of tasks the dancers were assigned.

Tamiris once proposed forming a repertory company that would perform works by the major artists of the time. Nothing came of that. But perhaps her idea, more practical and more urgently needed now, can be taken up by the festival, which had such a troupe in the 1970s. At the very least there should be a “Past/Forward” program every summer, before it is too late to save this vivid heritage.