DanceBoom! Festival.

Wilma Theater Philadelphia, Pennsylvania January 22-February 9, 2003 Reviewed by Brenda Dixon Gottschild

Philly's second annual DanceBoom! Festival presented nine companies performing in four showcases over a three-week period. Curators Nick Stuccio, Helen Henry, and Toni Shapiro-Phim innovatively paired contemporary and traditional artists on the same bills. The first evening featured ensembles that use feet as percussion instruments: jazz-tap dancers LaVaughn Robinson and Germaine Ingram; Natya, performing South Indian bharata natyam dance; and the flamenco ensemble Pas/on y Arte.

Played by a jazz trio, the old standard "`Tain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)" captured the essence of Ingram's and Robinson's appeal. Cool styling was their keynote. They were easygoing yet precise; playful but respectful of the work, the audience, and each other. They peppered the dances and songs with a sweet banter that poked gentle fun at Robinson's limited energy. (He's in his 70s.) But solid technique is there, and the traditional tap connection between dancers and musicians was reaffirmed with Gerald "Twig" Smith on guitar, Tyrone W. Brown playing bass violin, and John Blake Jr. on violin.

Robinson's style has mellowed with age. His feet stayed closer to the ground, hugging the floor and caressing the rhythms. Ingram performed a sensual Latin-rhythm tap to "You Don't Know What Love Is," stretching her style in wonderful new ways.

Shoba Sharma, founder and artistic director of Natya, danced Nandichol with her ensemble of eight neophytes, whose enthusiasm compensated for lack of experience. Sharma beautifully narrated and performed Asthtapadi, a solo meditation on love between Krishna and Radha. Both dances would have profited from some editing and Natya as the program opener.

Pasion y Arte is the right name for this intense, dramatic, all-female ensemble. With live accompaniment (singer Antonio de Jerez, musical director-guitarist Christian Puig, and percussionist and keyboardist Gonzalo Grau) they performed The Body Remembers. Wrapped in full-length, form-clinging, white silk dresses, the seven dancers slowly entered one by one and struck poses across the stage. Although they use traditional forms (farruca, siguiriyas, alegrias), they're a neo-flamenco group, creating contemporary innovations in the formal choreography and music. They personified modernity in a short interlude. Facing the audience in a line stretching across the upstage area, they sank from standing into a jazzy crouch. Snapping their fingers and stepping in unison, they approached the audience with a slinky, super low-down jazz walk. The weighted steps of the dark, moody, final solo, Remembering Carmen Mora, choreographed and danced by guest artist La Meira, epitomized the dramatic soul of the ensemble. Staging, choreography, timing, and sense of drama were impeccable throughout.

Like many traditional African dancers, the Pasion y Arte dancers were curvaceous and sensual-perfect for presenting the flamenco aesthetic. There were other artistic similarities: the arm work of flamenco and bharata natyam, the footwork of African American tap and flamenco. Sometimes the music, especially the percussion, was Afro-Latin, demonstrating an additional cross-cultural connection. THOUGH THE FORMS ON THIS PROGRAM WERE TRADITIONAL THE RENDITIONS WERE THOROUGHLY CONTEMPORARY SUGGESTING WE NEED TO DO AWAY WITH OLD CATEGORIES.

The second program paired Leah Stein's postmodern company with Kulu Mele African American Dance Ensemble, a Philadelphia treasure for more than thirty years, specializing in traditional West African dances. The connecting link was dancers-as-musicians. In Through Lines, Stein's dancers used their bodies (pounding fingertips on collarbones), small handheld instruments, and the walls and steps of the theater to extract sounds that shaped and counterpointed their contact improv-inspired movements. Kulu Mele's female dancers drummed while performing Yankadi, a courtship dance. In Makarou they played calabashes ringed with cowrie shells, creating a wonderful sound to accompany this joyous, fast-paced dance. Master drummer Robert Crowder and his still-dancing partner, Dorothy Wilkie, prove that age does not hinder the power and energy of African performance. Stein's work involves beautiful, gentle movement exploration that drives the musical progression and provides its own movement-based humor.

The final program showcased high-tech contemporary styles emanating from popular culture. A new company, olive: Hip-Hop Dance Theater, featured choreographer Raphael Xavier dancing with Richard Carmelo Soto, accompanied by percussion in a world music style. Xavier, a fine technician, abstracts the hip-hop vocabulary, loosening it from its usual musical moorings. Although tOy bOx felt like a work in progress, it was exhilarating to see this movement vocabulary transformed and reconstituted in a storybook theme of children's toys come to life.

Let's call the Koresh Dance Company the Ailey II of Philadelphia, in terms of technique, energy, and passion. They tore up a Donald Byrd world premiere, Living in East Podunk--a hilarious, scary, sarcastic, typically body-ripping-Byrd send-up of middle America. Dougie Styles, Travis Mesman, Alexander Simon, and Melissa Rector brought outstanding strength and clarity to Byrd's work and to Ronen Koresh's equally challenging Urban Crisis.

Dance needs more of this kind of programming. It's all dance, and it's all art.