Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century 5.

February 2-5, 1995 Reviewed by Ann Murphy

Over the years I've wrestled with the clinking, clanking title of Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century, the name of the seven-year-old festival that runs at Theater Artaud almost every winter. (This was actually the fifth one.) While it's a title that does get truncated to Black Choreographers Moving or, for the real insider, BCM, there's something important about the whole thing, the way it takes commitment to say and the way it makes you think, like the title of Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. It's a name that slyly captures the feel of young, smart, gifted, and black choreographers marching bravely forward to meet the strange new world that seems to lie ahead.

Artaud's recent directors are unstoppable optimists who believe that art can act as a mirror to society, with its hornet's nest of racism, homophobia, and class prejudice, as well as open a window on the individual soul. And so on the one hand the festival asserts that issues of race can't be sanitized or made irrelevant because Art is some genteel creature atop a fabled Olympus too lofty for the messy, temporal aspects of everyday life. On the other hand, Black Choreographers Moving claims with equal rightness that race does not necessarily define the artist and the art, however inescapable society's prejudice.

This year all the participants, from Joanna Haigood to Reginald Ray-Savage's Savage Dance Company, strove for some kind of balance, whether in the demands of dance and drama, rage and peace, or in social reality and the individual life. As a whole, the festival succeeded in fits and starts.

The artist who best found his balance--a taut, energetic bond between the formal parameters of dance and the rhythm of contemporary life--was twenty-seven-year-old Robert Henry Johnson, whose own dancing is as light and insouciant as an angel and as sassy as a bad boy. Not many years ago this San Francisco Ballet-trained dancer churned out work that was still full of the sandbox. Now his choreography is as joyous and ebullient as a Roman fountain and is beginning to have real, formal dimension. Johnson seems to put everything he sees into his choreographic basket--Mark Morris, Alonzo King, Twyla Tharp, Donald Byrd, and hip-hop--throbbingly arranges it all to Prince in The Learning Ground, and comes out with work that is organically ingenious and alive.

Robert Moses, a dancer with ODC/San Francisco, was the festival's raw nerve. His conceptual art work, The Blue Guerilla, set to the dire rhythms of The Last Poets, Malcolm X, and Gylain Kain, leaves a disturbing afterimage, like an explosion in the eye. With a collar around his neck and a rope stretching from wing to wing above him dangling a noose, Moses leaped and jerked about like Petrouchka in a concentration camp. He kept his face impassive in his despair, and out of this blankness one felt the rage of Blue Guerilla as a hard, unending pain. In the end, the yearning for revenge against racial humiliation became a howl from a land of infinite sorrow, devastated and grim.

But when he suddenly stopped performing and asked if we could see each other, asked that the lights come up, and asked finally, "How do we get past this?"--the racism, the rage--life and art fell together like enemy soldiers following a declaration of peace. The theater echoed with grief and guilt and hunger for answers. They came: Treat others the way you want to be treated; have children. Moses, who had climbed up the stairs into the audience, turned on his heels. No one could offer him the peace he sought, but the cavernous room stirred, unnerved and yet hopeful.

Savage Dance Company's jazz style was too limited, their sex roles woefully cliched, and their costumes stunningly unflattering, but this troupe danced heroically, like small windstorms. Haigood's charming Dance in a Bed, based on Remy Charlip's Air Mail Dance, was a dreamy solo that had worked better a few months earlier at Haigood's studio, where a suspended bed was affixed to the wall rather than floating. Albirda Rose's Transfiguration was a polished if too lengthy fusion of modern dance and African rhythms. Ben Carter and his group of exquisite dancers dove into formal rigor and came out with glinting gems that need a little visceral passion to balance and complicate the cerebral elegance and restraint of his work.

What was out of kilter in the festival was that dancers not yet able to handle half-hour stretches did so anyway, and works like Raymond Johnson's My Sin and TV Land lost their point. Another problem was the inclusion of work several years old and seen in other venues, such as the excerpts from Shakiri's potent Breathe. The festival seems like an ideal place to launch new material, risk new forms, and otherwise dare the next century to be different.