American Dance Festival 2007: Past/Forward

Dance Magazine, Oct, 2007 by Lea Marshall

American Dance Festival 2007: Past/Forward

Reynolds Industries Theater at Duke University, Durham, NC July 16-18, 2007

Taken all together, the Past/Forward program revealed not only a unique cross-section of dance history, but three interrelated aspects of the human struggle for transcendence. Dianne McIntyre's committed reconstruction of Helen Tamiris' 1937 protest piece How Long, Brethren? plunged into the not-so-distant past. With song (sung from the heart by Mavis Kashanda Poole and Ariane Reinhart) and dance (by ADF students) it recounted the bleak struggle for African Americans' freedom, even as slavery was supposedly long past. Bent backs in the fields, blindfolded faces, and rigid arms in a lynching, bodies locked in a line with feet trudging in unison like a chain gang--only during songs of prayer and death (at last, released! "Let's Go To De Buryin'"!) did hope and joy shimmer to the surface in smiles and stamps and lightning-fast whirls across the stage. Through those young dancers of many races, the work lived and breathed and felt true. The audience cheered.

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Shift gears. In the premiere of I Like a View But I Like To Sit With My Back To It, Rudy Perez seemed to choose form over freedom. Twenty-one dancers filled the stage and yet clustered in groups, carrying wooden boxes to and fro. One sat on a box and moved through a series of postures. Others jumped in place. They stood still and swung their arms in circles. Groups moved almost always in unison. The piece used dancers not to dance, but to illustrate boundaries. It boxed itself in, willfully.

Last came Laura Dean's Sky Light (1982), reconstructed by Rodger Belman, to teach us of freedom achieved. With two drummers stage left driving them on, these dancers in yellow, each commanding the stage in turn, moved through unison phrases, all angular limbs or pivots in fourth position. Then the spins began. One at a time, each in a slightly different position--arms out, or hands clasped behind back--spinning fast and clean, hypnotic. How would each dancer contain or disperse the energy generated by the force of the turning? They passed it on to the audience, and when they came back together to dance, to move forward and backward in lines, it was in celebration of that energy.

Back 70 years, ahead to the present, back 25 years, we had come full circle. And what better venue for such call and response than ADF, where history and forward progression exist side by side?

Go to www.dancemagazine.com to read Lea Marshall's review of ADF's Argentine Festival.

Reviewed by Lea Marshall