Ronald K. Brown/Evidence and Nnenna Freelon.

RONALD K. BROWN/EVIDENCE AND NNENNA FREELON NEW JERSEY PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, NEWARK, NJ NOVEMBER 12-13, 2005

Collaborators Nnenna Freelon and Ronald K. Brown didn't want to memorialize Lady Day by recounting her painful history. Instead, their Blueprint of a Lady: The Once and Future Life of Billie Holiday transforms her sultry blues to sheroic triumph. In this evening-length premiere, shown at NJPAC's intimate Victoria Theater, Freelon and Brown reclaimed Holiday's legacy, celebrating the blend of tradition and innovation that is African American popular culture.

Backed by a hearty jazz combo, Freelon sang her own compositions as well as new arrangements of Holiday's songs, turning one after another into vocal high-wire acts. If standards like "All of Me"--here morphed into a reggae march--scarcely resembled their originals, Brown's choreography and the dancers of EVIDENCE provided the reassuring anchor of the familiar.

We've come to know the way these dancers address the front of the stage (with bold assertion), its light-showered corners (with awe or expectation), its floor (with reverence), and one another (with exuberant pride). We see how the witty, vigorous movement styles of West Africa, northeastern Brazil, the black church, and the dance club have shaped them. We sense their spirituality, tribal sense of community, and zeal for social justice. In Blueprint, they offered a safe base for Freelon's expansive, sometimes eccentric journeys into the unknown. Harlem's faces--from a Romare Bearden collage used as the backdrop--emerged from machine-produced haze, also underscoring a fundamental sense of place.

Opening with Rodgers and Hart's "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," which Holiday made gentle, moody, and luscious, Freelon and dancer Camille Brown came out swinging, ready to take on the world. Both know very well, as Holiday did, that it's time for a woman (and artist) who can't be told what to do. Brown, in sparkling antique gold, propelled herself like a fireball that often suspended its mighty spin before resuming its attack. Freelon took the usually peppy "Them There Eyes" slowly while dancers strolled the stage's perimeter and later stroked and cleansed their bodies with bunches of gardenias. (Gardenias were the hair ornament of choice for Holiday.) In this work of renewal and self-affirmation, dancers Arcell Cabuag, Shani Collins, and Juel Lane also achieved standout performances. See www.ronkbrown-evidence.org.