Atlanta Ballet Company.

David Rousseve's Yellow-Tailed Dogs was the featured work of Atlanta Ballet's program entitled Body & Soul (Fox Theatre, Atlanta, February 1-4, 1996). The work uses movement, text, props, and gospel music to capture both the historical and present-day spirit of Atlanta. Three fictional characters tell the stories of their own Southern experiences, with the dancers and singers echoing these accounts in song and movement. The first character is an angry black man living in today's Atlanta slums. The dancers portray his deprivations with dramatic excitement which peaks as ten male dancers knife themselves; their convulsions are then quieted by the touch of their female companions. The second narrator is a white woman in 1954 (the year of school desegregation) who speaks of the old, gracious, Southern way of life, while seated dancers perform unison hand gestures as if nervously fidgeting at a school dance. The final, and most powerful, portrait is of a black man in 1938 reflecting on his harsh life as a slave and on his love for Hope, his yellow-tailed dog, who gave him the strength and courage to escape to freedom. Beautifully performed by the excellent dancers of Atlanta Ballet, Yellow-Tailed Dogs seems somewhat hampered by a a failure to fully integrate its various fine elements.