Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story.

A cult novel about black lesbian vampires might seem an improbable basis for a dance work, but then so are tales of sylphs and wilis--other kinds of female spirits who return from the grave to live an eternal life through dance.

In Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story, Urban Bush Women's founder and artistic director, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, uses songs, texts, and projected images, in addition to dance, to recount Jewelle Gomez's century-spanning narrative of an escaped slave girl who finds refuge in a New Orleans bordello and gradually assumes the beneficent vampiric powers of her new protectors. Along the way, we meet Gilda, the madam, and her female lover, Bird; their rather predictable opposite in a predatory male vampire, Fox; the Irissas (a guiding spirit trio); and assorted characters who surround the heroine, Girl (superbly acted and danced by Christine King), during different epochs of her lengthy existence.

Zollar presents all of this with a great deal of panache, using a script (by Gomez), rhythmic music and songs (by Toshi Reagon, seemingly influenced both by gospel and by Andrew Lloyd Webber), an atmospheric "sound score" (by Michael Keck), and a simple but effective decor of movable curtains and photographic projections (by Douglas D. Smith). Bones and Ash is nonetheless curiously uneven: it is strongest when Zollar uses the narrative as a structural backbone on which to layer more abstract preoccupations about women's lives and identities; often weak when the novel's conceits about "good" vampirism and immortality--utterly compelling, perhaps, in the life of the mind--are played out mimetically onstage.

The first half of the work is considerably better than the second, with energetic, African-influenced, grounded dancing from the Irissas (Michelle Dorant, Dionne Kamara, Amara Tabor-Smith), and the impressive Pat L. Hall as Gilda. In the second section, musical comedy takes over, with humorous dialogue, stereotypical characters, let's sing-a-song-to-cheer-ourselves-up routines, and an entirely unconvincing final routing of the dastardly Fox.

This lapse of tone might matter less if the dance didn't feel like the "deep" part of the production--the means by which Zollar gives resonance to the story's underlying questions of exclusion and mythmaking. with its virtual disappearance in the final section, the work seems to abandon its raison d'etre for nothing more profound than a feel-good finale. How do we learn to love? What does it mean to live forever?, asks a disembodied voice in the last moments. We could hardly expect Bones and Ash to provide us with answers, but it would have been more satisfying if this amalgam of dance, theater, and music had consistently provoked us into asking the questions ourselves.