651: BLACK DANCE: TRADITION AND TRANSFORMATION FESTIVAL.

INVENTION AT THE CULTURAL CROSSROADS 651: BLACK DANCE: TRADITION AND TRANSFORMATION FESTIVAL BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC HARVEY THEATER BROOKLYN, NEW YORK FEBRUARY 15-24, 2001

This innovative festival of African diaspora dance, now in its second year, doubled in length and size to two extended weekends and four mainstage concerts, offering worldclass performance in a community-based setting. The spirit of Katherine Dunham hovered over this year's panels, workshops, and master classes, and culminated with the first annual Dunham Legacy Award bestowed upon its namesake.

An overarching festival theme was the commonality between African and African American traditions in dance, spirituality, and honoring the ancestors. Whereas social protest was a leitmotif for 1960s black dancers, the millennial message is soulful healing. Abdel Salaam, artistic director of the Forces of Nature Dance Theatre Company, set the tone by his direction of Generations!, an occasional piece that screened vintage footage of fifteen black pioneers in recent American dance history (including Eleo Pomare, Rod Rodgers, Louis Johnson, Sarita Allen, Joan Miller, and Dianne McIntyre). After each film snippet, the darkened stage lit up to reveal that person in the flesh, dressed in street clothes and performing one phrase, center stage, before exiting. This was truly a historical moment.

It was exhilarating to see how continental African dance is motivating and changing contemporary American concert dance. This thread was evident in the unique movement vocabularies developed by Salaam and Ronald K. Brown/Evidence. Salaam's visual image for Terrestrial Wombs (1997)--one woman floating atop a huge expanse of billowing cerulean fabric (animated by erratic movements of the dance ensemble, invisible beneath its folds) is as strong as Alvin Ailey's fiver of cloth in the "Wade in the Water" section of Revelations.

Verge, Bebe Miller's premiere, is sparse and dry, yet lush and erotic. Her dancers approach and retreat, never climaxing, but lingering between tension and relaxation, passion and aggression. A tantalizing script, score, and lighting (by, respectively, Talvin Wilks, Hahn Rowe, and Michael Mazzola) helped create shades of meaning as subtle and elusive as the muted grays of Naoko Nagata's costumes and Scott Pask's set. Even when a walk is presented as a physical challenge or an arm is lifted like a broken wing, the work is elegant, beautiful. It's also funny, ironic, playful.

Compagnie Salia Ni Sedou, an accomplished modern dance ensemble from Burkina Faso in West Africa, performed Taagala [Traveler], a thrilling, mysterious excursion through a surreal landscape.

Thought-provoking solos by Robert Johnson and Nia Love completed this beautifully curated evening.

Touchingly agile inside a polyglot African-club-hip-hop-postmodern vocabulary that he invented, Ronald Brown is at the height of his creative powers, both as choreographer and dancer. (He performed in all three pieces on his program.) Evidence's dances are about the healing power of the moving body and the ways we resonate with our past, roots, and ancestors. As in the black church, the effect is infectious. Audience call-and-response was common during performances, followed by well-deserved sustained standing ovations. Portraying migration and dislocation, the material and the spiritual, defeats and triumphs, Upside Down (1998), Water (1999), and High Life (2001)--a New York premiere--flowed into one another, a seamless continuum of movement, music, poetry, and gesture. It was a fulfilling closure to this year's festival.