Denishawn Repertory Dancers.

TERRACE THEATER, KENNEDY CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C. JANUARY 30-31, 1996 REVIEWED BY GEORGE JACKSON 

An exceptional afflux of vintage modern dance in Washington during January shed light on three repertoires, those of Isadora Duncan, Denishawn [Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn), and Michio Ito. There was much they shared. The form of the works was clear, almost simple. Movement was, mostly, direct-what you saw is what there was. Impetus tended to arise from relaxed positions rather than from bodies primed to go. That the sense of scale was smallish, space often restricted, and dynamic contrasts emphatic produced considerable stylization. So did the immediacy with which motion responded to music.

Of the four choreographers, three chose astonishingly similar scores (Schubert's Ave Maria was used by Duncan as well as Ito, and St. Denis set Schubert waltzes; both St. Denis and Duncan waltzed to Brahms; Ito and also St. Denis did Debussy). Shawn, the partial exception, didn't dislike the European tradition but he, and Ito to an extent, explored composers from its rim-including Americans and Asian Americans. Today, many of these vintage dances seem inflexibly set and make their music sound like salon pieces. This may date the work, but it doesn't devalue it.

On the Duncan program, directed by Andrea Mantell-Seidel, one could admire the softness of the movement and its display of the body as sculpted surfaces. Of true muscularity there was little, even in Impressions of Revolutionary Russia. On occasion, the joy of running seemed a response to visions of a brave new world beyond the audience's view. Many of the numbers, though, were suffocatingly sweet. Was this the spirit of what pundits had dubbed the Isadorables-child performers trained at Duncan's establishment? It remained for guest artist Bambi Anderson to differ. Her sharp accentuation, patent force, and unguarded amplitude of movement may be alien to Duncanism. Yet the fires Anderson lit in the 1905 Furies and the 1910 Brahms Waltzes burned in a manner that must have been akin to Isadora's. Credited as the artistic advisor of the Duncan dances was Julia Levien, a student of two of the Isadorables.

In the Denishawn program, something of St. Denis's mystic delicacy or Shawn's determined sensuality was evoked by even the most limiting of the stylizations. His dances are locked into concepts; hers have more freedom. Among the dancers, Jacqulyn Buglisi made actual the link between St. Denis and Martha Graham. Sources for this troupe, directed by Janet Rowthorn, were Denishawn survivor Jane Sherman and Shawn disciple Barton Mumaw.

Ito, represented by just six numbers, was more powerful than Denishawn with thirteen and Duncan with twenty. Of course, there was less chance for repetition. More crucial may have been the opportunity for performers from Dana Tai Soon Burgess's Moving Forward Dance Company to steep themselves in material that seems exquisitely logical and, instead of limited, never excessive. In Pizzicati, Burgess's stance was human and mortal, his motion-particularly the arms that flashed like sword blades and rotated like propellers-had the endurance of art. Sarah Craft, in Ave Maria, traveled a thoughtful path from prayer to prayer by rising from kneeling, stretching her body, moving her arms in canon, and bowing her head. Satoru Shimazaki demonstrated how breathing and feeling enrich movement. Michiko Yoshimura Kitsmiller showed a more centered Ito style than Shimazaki's outgoing approach. This sampling of Ito, enhanced by the scholarly comments of Mary-Jean Cowell and documentation by Hiro, seems to have influenced a group of young choreographers from Moving Forward to think of arms and torsos, not just of steps, for their own forays into choreography.