Limon Dance Company.

LIMON DANCE COMPANY JOYCE THEATER, NEW YORK, NY SEPTEMBER 21-OCTOBER 3, 2004

Carla Maxwell, since 1978 director of the Limon Dance Company, has brought added meaning to the word "steadfast." She and her associates, Roxane D'Orleans Juste and Nina Watt, have held to the artistic vision of Jose Limon with vitality and respect and without the overweening weight of sentimentality.

As a dancer, Limon was heroically proportioned. He used his torso like an organ console. His arms reached upward from the waist, not the shoulders. His legs, with knees flexed and feet often feeling their way sideways, had an almost primitive inflection.

As a choreographer, he was a humanist; he took people seriously. And today's Limon Company, whether it reiterates his works or those of the choreographers who have added to the repertoire over the years, has kept to this path. Perhaps this is why it has endured.

The single world premiere was Susanne Linke's Extreme Beauty, to an urgent score by Gyorgy Kurtag and Salvatore Sciarrino. Created for five women led by D'Orleans Juste, it explored a four-part dreamworld. With teasing hips and buttery arms, they shared an atmosphere at once vulnerable and mysterious. Unlike her former mentor, Pina Bausch, Linke relies on pure dance as well as on visual play; for example, winding D'Orleans Juste into serpentine wedding attire or having the other women balance high-heeled red sandals on their heads.

Of the company premieres, Lar Lubovitch's Concerto Six Twenty-Two was the most distinguished. Perhaps because Lubovitch has a more thorough classical background than Limon did, he is capable of greater dynamic variety--of shifting from slow to fast, from ground to air. Throughout, but especially in the poetic duet shared by Jonathan Riedel and Charles Scott, he was consistently aware of the playfulness and poignancy of the Mozart accompaniment.

The company also premiered Daniel Nagrin's solo Dance in the Sun (1951), with an energetic dance flow from Raphael Boumaila and an equally energetic piano score by Ralph Gilbert, and Donald McKayle's Angelitos Negros, danced by D'Orleans Juste with the directness that lends a convincing gravitas to everything she undertakes.

Especially welcome was the revival of Limon's elegant solo Chaconne (1942). Danced by Riedel and subsequently by D'Orleans Juste, its emotion--charged gestures challenged both artists with its grandeur. D'Orleans Juste, perhaps because she is more experienced, treated the dance with soul-spoken depth.

Humanism became a gentle folk expression in Jiri Kylian's Evening Songs, also a revival. The seven dancers gave it such a fresh interpretation that the dance seemed newborn.

Limon created Psalm in 1967 and The Unsung in 1970, the latter only two years before his death. Both are in a heroic vein; both are choreographic acts of faith. And both works benefit from the current strength of the Limon ensemble. Its members have an unusually consistent esprit de corps, and they identify honestly with the repertoire.

Psalm, to a newly commissioned score by Jon Magnussen, reflects the Jewish tradition of 36 men chosen to bear the sorrows of the world. A soloist personifies them; both Robert Regala and Riedel gave caring portrayals. When Doris Humphrey was associated with Limon, one of her challenges was to edit his output. She probably would have persuaded him to make the cuts that Psalm needs, so that the swirling corps and the fiercely leaping central figure do not draw one's attention from piety to athleticism.

The Unsung recalls eight Native American icons, personified with great passion in a series of solos by Rod Seeber (Metacomet), Kurt Douglas (Pontiac), Francisco Ruvalcaba (Red Eagle), Scott (Tecumseh), Boumaila (Black Hawk), and Riedel (Sitting Bull). While similar in scope to Psalm, it is more concise and carefully punctuated. Part of this comes from the accompaniment of footbeats alternating with terse interstices of silence.

Adam Hoagland's Phantasy Quintet, also from the repertoire, displays a casualness that was refreshing, especially since this trait is not characteristic of today's Limon Dance Company, any more than it was characteristic of its founder.

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