American Dance Festival, Page Auditorium and Reynolds Industries Theater, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, June 11-July 26, 1998.

AMERICAN DANCE FESTIVAL PAGE AUDITORIUM AND REYNOLDS INDUSTRIES THEATER, DUKE UNIVERSITY, DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA JUNE 11-JULY 26, 1998 REVIEWED BY SUSAN BROILI

The American Dance Festival's sixty-fifth-anniversary season provided plenty of "hot" programs and "cool" moments.

In "Masterpieces of the Black Tradition," Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, both technically superb and expressive, performed, over three evenings, seventeen dances: revivals of work by Donald McKayle, Asadata Dafora, Eleo Pomare, Katherine Dunham, and Talley Beatty, as well as dances sure to become classics by Ulysses Dove and Milton Myers. The series opened with McKayle's 1959 Rainbow `Round My Shoulder by Dayton, a compelling portrayal of men on a chain gang, and closed with Myers's exuberant, sensory, sensual 1984 Raindance, in which Robinson's company danced up a storm. Among the many other highlights: Dayton's G.D. Harris's hypnotic embodiment of a regal bird, chest pushed out, arms rotated to display wings, fingers feathering the air in Dafora's 1932 Awassa Astrige/Ostrich, a gem worthy of preservation.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Urban Bush Women showed their staying power, exuding the ferocious female energy needed to survive and make their voices heard. The rehearsal motif in Self-Portrait by Zollar made it clear that their repertory is rooted in their individuality and solidarity. Their premiere of Zollar's Hands Singing Song paid tribute to those who have lent a hand to freedom's struggle, and demonstrated hand signs that denote belonging; the female hand that expresses sexuality, prayer, and healing; and the way a hand can become a fist to show defiance of oppression or to cause in-fighting.

Foreign dancemakers created varied worlds. Compagnie Schmid-Pernette's Relief(s), choreographed and danced by Nathalie Pernette and Andreas Schmid, with Severine Rieme, depicted a garden party's aftermath when energy, magic, and mayhem still run high. In the seventy-five-minute ongoing work that included three solo premieres, these French dancers turned into imps with illuminated horns, crouched on a wall, then vanished by slipping behind it. Pernette and Schmid dueled by blowing snaky rolled-paper party noisemakers out, up, and down. Pernette, with the aplomb and clumsy, hysterical edge of the Muppets' Swedish Chef, tried to chop up an inflated rubber woman with a knife while a hail of plastic body parts, carrots, and potatoes hit the stage. Schmid's entrance was preceded by a potato he had soccer-kicked; his exit left the stage empty for several minutes--time enough to contemplate the apres-party mess and imagination just displayed.

"Celebrating Israel's 50th Anniversary" featured premieres by Barak Marshall, Inbal Pinto, and Brenda Angiel. Angiel's South, Wall and After looked like a ballet for bats, as dancers clung to, hung from, swung across, and rappelled down a wall. Pinto's theater-of-the-absurd Frieda & Rosa introduced five bent-over "aunts" on short stilts, covered by long Victorian dresses. Their torsos twitched, and their stiff skirts crackled. Then two seated women--close "cousins," perhaps--intertwined left arms and, with their other arms, executed complicated gestures while keeping up a constant conversation of tongue clicks and synchronized leg movements. Theresa Hardy and Ariane Malia Reinhart made it look easy.

Marshall explored the ancestral and contemporary Jewish experience in The Wive's Tale. He used spoken word, song, and movement characterized by the wide stance and bent knees of folk dance, with sixteen dancers, including Pinto and his mother, choreographer Margalit Oved, a remarkable performer with enormous presence and a versatile voice. She sang wild, exotic songs with a piercing, soulful quality that made hair rise on the back of your neck.

Former Paul Taylor dancers David Grenke and David Parsons are as different as night and day, but their premieres, presented on separate programs, proved worth watching. The brooding, introspective Grenke's multimedia, evening-length Triptych Humpty-Dumpty presented people who seemed psychologically stuck, as suggested by much standing still--though with dramatic intensity, as though waiting for Godot. Gina Paolillo's repeated soft drop-rolls resembled a paddle wheel in water--perhaps an attempt to move on. While Grenke's work was dark and hermetic, the playful, imaginative Parsons literally threw light on his subject, which seemed to be the ways in which dancers, holding various lights, can illuminate the body. The result was Fill the Woods With Light, to music composed for the dance by jazz artist Phil Woods and performed live by his eight-piece band. Delightful.

In his own way, Merce Cunningham is delightful, too. There is something oddly comforting about the constant nature of change his work embraces. His forty-minute Event included an excerpt from the 1964 Winterbranch in which he made falling look both inevitable and inventive--especially the repeated fall in which two dancers appear to intersect by chance and one leans backward on the back of the other and slips softly to the floor like one of Salvador Dali's limp clocks. In the orchestra pit, Takehisa Kosugi, carefully avoiding looking at the dancers so as not to be "influenced," improvised with stones, shells, paper fan, tin can, and various electronic apparatus to produce music that included the sounds of cicadas and a flushing toilet. Two more great dances filled this program: the 1975 Sounddance and the 1998 Pond Way. The latter, premiered in Paris, is the most beautiful Cunningham work I've ever seen, one in which all the elements (though, of course, not by design) coalesced to create a watery world in which dancers sometimes appeared as ibis and frogs. Suzanne Gallo's white costumes, with slits on the inside of pants and sleeves, billowed, adding to the fluidity.

The skaters of the Next Ice Age ended the season with some really "cool" moves, including porters forming the giant wheels and pistons of a train in locomotion in director Nathan Birch's premiere of Starr-Struck to recordings by Kay Starr (who attended the opening). Maybe the sweltering July heat wave had something to do with finding this company downright refreshing as cool air wafted off the ice onstage. The skaters' technical expertise, artistry, and ability to translate ice dancing to a theater stage--they exited as though they had a whole pond of ice when they only had a few feet--also made an impression, as did their flexibility. One dancer turned herself into a flamingo by bending a leg behind her body and holding it with her hands; another held the most perpendicular arabesque imaginable, her legs at six o'clock. Now that's cool.