Limon Dance Company. - Joyce Theater, New York, NY - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1996 by Lynn Garafola

Live music has become a rarity at dance performances these days. Happily, the Limon Dance Company defies this trend. Throughout its New York season the pleasure of listening rivaled that of seeing. Except for a handful of works, live music - beautifully played - was the order of the day.

Exceptional, too, was the season's time-traveling repertoire. Doris Humphrey's Air for the G String (1928), Two Ecstatic Themes (1931), The Call (1929), Breath of Fire (1930), and Day on Earth (1947) paid homage to the company's first artistic director in this centenary year of her birth, while Daniel Nagrin's finely crafted character sketches, Strange Hero and Spanish Dance (both 1948), revived interest in an artist who has been unjustly neglected. With The Moor's Pavane (1949) and a suite of dances from A Choreographic Offering (1964), the company honored its founder, Jose Limon.

New to the repertoire this season were Donald McKayle's Sombra y Sol (Images of Frida Kahlo) (1991) and Ralph Lemon's pole grass and blue, and then red, the latter a premiere. Like Garth Fagan's Never No Lament (1994) and Phyllis Lamhut's Sacred Conversations (1993), which were also performed this season, both testify to artistic director Carla Maxwell's commitment to make the company a repository of living works in the humanist tradition of modern dance.

Unfortunately, neither new piece was particularly successful. Set to a commissioned score by Anthony Davis, pale grass was especially disappointing, a series of gestures - bending, ambling, lunging, circling - devoid of suggestion that ended abruptly when the music ran out. Inspired by the magical realism of painter Frida Kahlo, Sombra y Sol served its dancers better. As Kahlo, ringmaster and protagonist of the work's four tableaux, Maxwell made the most of a role that captured the artist's many faces: lover, child, bully, flirt, goddess, emblem of Mexican womanhood. Carlos Orta, whose hands are as supple as those of a flamenco dancer, was touching as the Exquisite Cadaver, while Pamala Jones, pierced like St. Sebastian by arrows of death, was fleet and innocent as Little Deer.

With their bright colors and constructed forms Elizabeth Novak's costumes enhanced the playfulness of Kahlo's fantasies, as did the gay rhythms of Aaron Copland's Danzon Cubano and Three Latin American Sketches. The weakest element was the choreography: the enchantment of thigh-slapping monkeys and unfocused groupings quickly palls.

With their liquid torsos, fluid arms, and sense of flow, the dancers were at their best in Limon's works. In the five newly revived sections of A Choreograpbic Offering, they moved like the celebrants of a joyous rite through his expansive configurations in space, the wheeling lines, crisscrossing horizontals, and ascending diagonals that convey the elation of social community that is central to Limon's humanism.

This communal sensibility permeates everything the company does, even works like Fagan's Never No Lament, where the emphasis on line and sustained balances sits uneasily on bodies attuned to tactile rather than visual qualities of movement.

The presence of senior dancers - Maxwell, Orta, Nina Watt - in ensemble roles adds to the sense of shared purpose, while bringing authority and dramatic conviction to works like The Moor's Pavane, even when, as in Orta's case, the physical instrument is declining. Unsurprisingly, it was Watt who revealed the full drama of Humphrey's choreography, not only in The Call and Breath of Fire where the mounting tension of the side bends and repeated falls built to a genuine climax, but also in Day on Earth, where her playful Ophelia set off the womanliness of Maxwell's grieving, archetypal mother. In Air for the G String, led 6y Merle Holloman, and Two Ecstatic Themes, performed by Roxane D'Orleans Juste, a tendency to pose undermined the power of Humphrey's text.

Given Humphrey's link with the company, this was certainly disappointing. More disturbing, however, was the absence of a fully satisfying contemporary work, one, say, like Mark Morris's Gloria, where the physicality, spatial awareness, and elated emotion form a natural bond with the company's inherited legacy. The piece would fit the dancers like a glove, while honoring the spirit of community that Limon held dear.