JAZZ DANCE WORLD CONGRESS.

JAZZ DANCE WORLD CONGRESS UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO'S CENTER FOR THE ARTS BUFFALO AUGUST 4-8, 1999

They came together From Four countries, a global village bound by Lycra and a love of all that jazz. But when they took the stage the performers at this year's Jazz Dance World Congress proved that they originate from distinct artistic provinces.

There was New York's Ted Levy, chatting and gleefully tapping from one spotlight to the next, providing counterpoint to the proud flamenco of Los Angeles's Instincts Live Media Dance Company that was led by a regal Liz Imperio. There was the classically influenced Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal opposite the pyrotechnic athletics of Japan's Masashi Action Machine. Clearly, Congress founder Gus Giordano doesn't want to see jazz bound by any lines of demarcation. The festival of performances--I saw three of five eclectic and ultimately satisfying programs--is his response to those who would box it in with labels.

Among the many standouts at the final Congress of the twentieth century were the works of a choreographer whose eyes are fixed on the twenty-first. In 00101.com, Mia Michaels, founder of Mia Michaels R.A.W. (Reality At Work) and also a freelance choreographer, creates the embodiment of computer circuitry with four dancers: Corinne McFadden, Mark Meismer, Ronnie Toderowski, and Tiffany Tregarthen. Together their sharp shuffle steps accent their jerky arm gestures and their frantic head tilts. Here, Michaels appears to be meditating on humanity's unnaturally cozy relationship with its personal computers. Whatever Michaels's motivation, she makes a compelling, and disturbing, statement.

For Utah Contemporary Dance Company, a troupe whose ability to play to an audience belies its apparent youth, Michaels developed Shed My Skin, the working title for a quirky play on identity that is set to a Bach harpsichord concerto. Regrettably, the otherwise engaging work ends on a gimmicky note, with the dancers stripping to their underwear.

In the everything-that's-old-is-new-again category, four Utah company members collaborated on choreography for a tribute to the Big Band era in Club Calloway. The lindy hopping enjoys moments of abandon, but it too often relies on predictable patterns.

Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago premiered Alberto Arias's Surrender, a sumptuous dance that explores the terrain of the heart--primarily romantic love and loss. With its insistence on clean lines and clear extensions, Arias's choreography suits the strengths of Giordano's company, particularly the seamless partnering of Devert Hickman and Christie Lopez Perrone.

The Giordano ensemble launched the festival with Randy Duncan's Can't Take This Away, an appropriately celebratory choice that develops tension and its release with the use of tight group formations-many dancers moving as a single amoeba-like creature--that are broken when a lone dancer bursts out of the pack.

That formation, also a Bob Fosse favorite, made an anticipated appearance in Nilsson Schmilsson, Ann Reinking's choreographic bow to the music of Harry Nilsson. Performed by Spectrum Dance Theater from Seattle, Nilsson Schmilsson bears numerous Fosse-style imprints. The curled wrists, the hunched shoulders, the angular stances--they're all there. But where Fosse's sexuality usually came off as self-conscious, Reinking's is playful, even giddy. In one section, "Let the Good Times Roll," a trio of men madly shimmy their shoulders, shamelessly flirting with an audience that rightly responds to them as goofballs rather than as sex symbols.

Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, one of the busier ensembles in North America, pieced together various stylistic hallmarks into a pleasing whole in a compilation of separate ballets called "Bloc Puzzle." First, Eric J. Miles displayed his sinuous strength in William Whitener's sizzling Blue in Green. The second piece, Louis-Martin Charest's La Mort de L'Ange, looked like an untangled tango, a short-form drama about two dance partners, the well-matched Susan Gaudreau and Edgar Zendejas, who never truly connected. Two sections of James Kudelka's popular Ghosts, a suite set to seven Beatles songs, completes the "Puzzle." Miles and the flexible Nathalie Huot take the lyrics to the Fab Four's "Come Together"--"Come together, right now, over me"--literally, stepping over and around the body of Robert Rubinger, who is lying on the ground. Watching "Come Together," one has to wonder what kind of injuries Rubinger must have sustained in rehearsal.

Since JDWC 2000 will be held at the University at Buffalo's Center for the Arts, which is only a hop, skip, and jump from the border, we may see more of Canada's fine jazz dance companies next year.