LIMON DANCE COMPANY.

LIMON DANCE COMPANY JOYCE THEATER OCTOBER 5-17, 1999 REVIEWED BY LYNN GARAFOLA

The Limon Dance Company gave its last New York season of the millennium--and it was a winner. Eighteen dancers strong, with a repertory committed to the humanist tradition of modern dance, LDC continues to pack in audiences, more today than ever.

This season the company added to its laurels with a splendid revival of Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies. Choreographed in 1937 for England's Ballet Rambert, the work has the spareness and sobriety of an older style of modern dance. Yet until now, it has never been staged by a modern dance company.

Set to Gustav Mahler's Songs on the Death of Children, Dark Elegies is haunted by loss. People have said that the ballet was Tudor's response to the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, but there is nothing ethnically specific about Tudor's community of plain folk. With their drab clothing and monumental gravity, they mourn their dead like Everymen performing an age-old ritual of grief.

The Limon dancers brought to the work a heightened sense of community. At the same time, their falls, use of weight, and belief in the moral dimension of art, corny and old-fashioned as that sounds, gave the work a mythic quality: what transpired had the inevitability of a folk tragedy. Although the choreography posed few technical challenges (Donald Mahler, who staged the ballet, did not put the women on pointe), the upper-body freedom that is second nature to the Limon dancers was often missing, as if they were afraid of being themselves.

The virtues that made Dark Elegies a success were underscored by Doug Varone's newest work for the company, The Plain Sense of Things. This, too, was about a community, although Varone's world is urban America of the 1950s, with its street-comer "hoods" and rumbles of discord that recall West Side Story, even if the seemingly casual movement belongs to the 1990s. Strikingly lit by David Ferri, permeated with the atmosphere of Philip Glass's coolly propulsive Saxophone Quartet, these small-time punks and their careworn parents are protagonists of an epic of the ordinary.

Also new to the repertory this season was a reconstruction of Sophie Maslow's Champion. First performed in 1948, it is interesting today only as a period piece. As boxer Midge Kelly, Jonathan Riedel is all nerves, fury, and guff. But the choreography is thin, and the dancers, wonderful as they were, could not make up for its limited vocabulary.

There were many outstanding performances this season by the company's younger dancers: Natalie Desch's grief-stricken mother in Dark Elegies; Bradon McDonald's magnificently satanic Iago in The Moor's Pavane; Kimiye Corwin's vulnerable romanticist in Champion; Zhen Jun Zhang's quicksilver creature in The Winged. Adding to the embarrassment of riches at nearly every performance was live music.