Florida Dance Festival.

Temple Emanu-El and New World Dance Theatre Miami/Miami Beach, FL June 15-29, 2003

Lovers of the spoken word, take heart: Text thrives amid contemporary movement. At least that's what the twenty-fifth annual Florida Dance Festival suggested throughout two weeks of performances by Floridian and national artists.

Opening night belonged to Giovanni Luquini & Dancers, whose director, a native of Brazil, has bolstered Miami's dance scene for several years with intense solos and duets and the longer, freer associations of dance-theater collage, often with percussive, electronic accompaniment. "SLICES" SHOWED OFF THOSE ARTISTIC TENDENCIES, INCLUDING EXCERPTS AND A WORK-IN-PROGRESS, PACKAGED WITH AN OVERALL THEME: HOW WE RIDE CRESTS OF YEARNING--IN WARINESS OR SURRENDER--THROUGH PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS.

Some segments of works proved more mystifying than engagingly mysterious: Such was the case in Persona, where a man on a swing at center stage and women at his sides (one battling with a box; the other with a stack of papers) evoked a three-ring circus, separated but similarly obsessive in their tasks. To better effect, Um-Bigo, still in development, put Joanne Barrett and Rachel Carroll--circling and languishing over each other--through symbiotic paces. "Slices," notwithstanding the occasional opaqueness due to fragmentation, gave off ardent glints, as Barrett and Luquini--stalking, cradling--sparked ladies for connection. The shifts of affection between two couples in Competition developed this imagery further, with a striking solo for the tightly wound Noibis Licea Ponce. Moves gained dimension through Elizabeth Doud's prickly, sometimes facetious script, including rules of attraction fired off by Jennylin Duany with opera-diva authority and girl-prodigy drollness.

The focus got fuzzier in a subsequent "Florida Dances" program. Tampa's Moving Current Dance Collective and Orlando's VOCI Dance Company leaned toward exotic and ethereal gestures and sweeps with music to match. Keener solos came from Fort Lauderdale's Elana Lanczi and especially Peter Kalivas, playful yet neatly calibrated to Schubert in Sean Curran's Better to Be Looking at It Than for It.

Sporting what's become a ubiquitous look for contemporary companies--with dive-in, fling-out partnering in a hyperactive mode--Creach/Company brought the collaborative Roadwork (2002), inspired by male labor. Though sleek in sinew and sure in speed, the delivery of six men in colorful tank tops seemed no more than a flashy streak (accompanied by industrial sounds) until Joseph Poulson and Keith Thompson deepened emotion in a slow exploration of contact that seemed bolder than bravado. Talk entered the picture when the group applied muscle to forge combinations following commands.

Brawn also figured, but sublimely in Claire Porter's Namely Muscles, the apotheosis of words at the festival. Witty and wily she portrayed a physician-poet reciting from her latest work--strutting, stretching, striking a panoply of poses throughout odes, a limerick, nursery rhymes, and haiku. Cheers to our musculature's marvelous drama!

Homer Avila left an equal sense of wonder in the human body on the "danceAble" program (also featuring a duet from Germany's DIN A 13 Dance Company). Having lost his right leg and hip to cancer, Avila has turned a challenging situation into an exaltation of grace. He was tenacious--hopping, rotating, plunging--in the circles of Solo, choreographed by Victoria Marks, and sometimes coolly contemplative in Dana Caspersen's Solo for One Man. In his own Not Without Words, he spoke out: "I lost my shoe ... my equilibrium ... my confidence," working his way toward precarious balance on a tiny chair. Concluding with "I lost ... my fear," he left no doubt as to the beauty in that truth.

Near/Far/In/Out, the closing premiere directed by Peter DiMuro of Dance Exchange Express, a Liz Lerman Dance Exchange project, remained in stretches well-meaning sociology rather than meaningful art. Yet, giving projection to oral histories tied to the local gay community, this managed to intimately engage, thanks to the spunk and pensiveness of some non-professionals who paraded by. Still, in joining movement to testimony, it was the experienced presence of Elizabeth Johnson, Marvin Webb, and superbly evocative Martha Wittman that carried plain pronouncements closer to the transcendence of struggle.