AFRICAN HERITAGE IN THE NORTHWEST U.S.

NORTHWEST AFRIKAN AMERICAN BALLET ARLENE SCHNITZER CONCERT HALL PORTLAND, OREGON FEBRUARY 12, 2000 REVIEWED BY MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

Brace Smith, founder and artistic director of Northwest Afrikan American Ballet, is the quintessential showman, which accounts for both the strength and the weakness of the 28-year-old Portland company's Heritage Concert at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

Smith is passionately dedicated to the proposition that understanding between the races can be promoted through the music and dance of Africa, and to that end he creates, for an evening at least, a human village in the unlikely setting of the converted movie palace that is also home to the Oregon Symphony.

Twelve dancers and four master musicians, including Smith, worked their way through a program of five musical interludes and six dances--theatricalized versions of tribal dances from Guinea and Senegal, as well as an elaborate South African gum-boot dance.

In Lamba, the curtain rose on a moonlit tableau of dancers with arms outstretched, their long, flowing white costumes draped as elegantly as a fashion shoot. The Senegalese dance, choreographed by Smith and accompanied by the excellent singing of Tracy Harris, was a visual knockout, a dance that seduced the audience with its sheer joie de vivre.

Once the drums began, the dancers changed position and swung into action, their costumes swirling around them as their feet hit the floor in complicated rhythmic patterns. RoseEtta Menger's colored lights created a corps of Loie Fullers, African style. This piece, unlike the others, contained the spontaneity and improvisation inherent in African tribal dance.

The flip side was the GumBoot Dance, equally showy, with a dramatic set suggesting a diamond mine, performed by the company at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh in the summer of 1999. Smith has worked for many years to perfect this piece, collaborating with Soweto choreographer Themba Ntshingana to create variations of the body-slapping, foot-stomping rhythms for a cast of dancers that includes women and guest performers. The result was problematic: Out of the hardship of working in the mines came the original boot dance, an expression of political and economic oppression. Slicking it up dilutes the impact, waters down the history, and turns it into an admittedly well-performed trick.

Three pieces choreographed by former Ballets Africains dancer Youssouf Koumbassa were company premieres. Sorsoner, marred by glittery costumes too reminiscent of the Folies Bergere, featured high-stepping male dancing and movement that was shaped differently from other work on the program. Sofa, a hunting dance, was more simply presented and therefore more compelling, as was the ceremonial Sinte.