Jazzdance. - Joyce Theater - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, June, 1995 by Rick Whitaker

Joyce Theater February 7-12, 1995

Danny Buraczeski is a fascinating, expert jazz dancer with a classic jazz physique: knees slightly turned in, broad pelvis, downward-pushing shoulders, loose limbs. And if his choreography is not likely to be important in the history of dancing, at least it is wholesomely alive now. The three pieces on this program, all from 1993, showed good variety and a fair skill at dance invention and structure.

Buraczeski's company, though, is weak. Based in Minneapolis, it is a completely regional group. All of them white, they study a little ballet, a little modern, a little jazz. But if they're committed to Buraczeski's company, one wants to ask, why don't they study Buraczeski? There is some truth to the claim that he is drawing on modern and ballet styles; but he is really a very good jazz stylist, and for his dancers to be tinkering with ballet occurs to me as worse than a waste of time. What they need to get into their bodies is something very different from the pulled-up, long line of ballet training. Instead, they need a light downward thrust and a broken configuration of short lines.

The dancers (except for Buraczeski, who's 46) are all young (which the choreography does not require), and they're all concerned with looking glamorous. Only Buraczeski consistently risks goofiness, a kind of bravery apparently inimical to ordinary youth. They all want to be dancers, but not necessarily jazz dancers. I don't blame them, but Buraczeski deserves eight real allies.

The best piece is Fuerza Viva, a Caribbean dance hall number. It's a stylized version of people having fun together, dancing to amazing music by the likes of Tito Puente and Dizzy Gillespie. I love the tango duet for Buraczeski and Cathy Young but wonder why they so seldom look at each other. In all the social dancing of a similar nature I've seen, the man and woman look at nothing but each other.

The "modern dance" organization of On My Way, to gospel music sung by Mahalia Jackson, is respectable to a fault. During a long sequence on the floor for the whole cast, to "In the Upper Room," the dancers prove too light, too balletic, for that digging into the ground the music makes us yearn for. A duet for Mathew Janczewski and Mike McGowan, lyrical and harmless, is nonetheless lovely. Swing Concerto completed the evening. The lighting design for all three pieces, by Barry Browning, is always perfect - undistracting, unpretentious, and positively interesting.