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

Dance Magazine, July, 1994 by Bill Deresiewicz

Because its founder died in 1972, the Limon company has had ten years more than most others to adjust to what all troupes eventually have to face. How do you maintain a repertoire after the loss of its creator? The evidence so far is that you can't: Technique and style might survive, but purpose and sensibility cannot be bequeathed.

That the company's shortcomings are not primarily technical was demonstrated by a number of lovely solo performances. I had seen flawless renditions of Daniel Nagrin's Spanish Dance (1948), but Nina Watt made this evocation of flamenco into far more. As if listening to the call of a small voice inside her muscles, she seemed lost in a reverie about flamenco, a recollection or fantasy of distant passion. The strengths of the company's four younger women lit up Limon's Dances for Isadora (1971). Pamala Jones stormed through "Maenad" like a swift-flowing mountain stream; Roxane D'Orleans Juste was elegant and fervent in "Niobe"; Emilie Plauche's lightness of touch in "Primavera" balanced the boldness and gusto of Merie Holloman's "La Patrie." On the men's side, Paul Dennis, a cat who slinks and springs, found the perfect role as a movieland gangster in Nagrin's Strange Hero (1948). And Carlos Orta, the company's senior man, simply entered his own dimension in the mixture of mime and meditation Nagrin called Indeterminate Figure (1957). There is more expressive power in each of Orta's outsized hands than in whole classes of conservatory graduates.

But a solo avoids the real problem of revivals. Beyond technique, beyond steps, a dance needs both purpose - a sense of meaning - and conviction - a belief in that meaning. The solo dancer can supply these from within herself, but in ensemble work they can only be a collective creation. Which means, so the evidence of this season argued, that the choreographer himself must breathe them into the dancers. They are his purpose, his conviction. The Moor's Pavane (1949), There Is a Time (1956), Mazurkas (1958): in each, some fine individual performances; in all, a dead space between individuals. What do these works mean to us? Why are they being done today?

One can perpetuate a style, but style is only the fingerprint of sensibility. The Limon style, at once spare and fluid, chaste and lyrical, embodied an idea of feeling as intense and pure, of individuals as simple and strong. But who understands these things anymore? The feelings we believe in now are muted and complex, the individuals tentative, conflicted. Such is the sensibility of Garth Fagan's "Never No Lament," the season's premiere. As its title (a quotation from Duke Ellington) suggests, the dance evokes the huddled hope that is that sensibility's vision of heroism and community. Neither bombastic nor naive, the work's passion accumulates with a quiet insistence. Fagan's composition, while competent, is not as crafted as Limon's, nor is his vision, though persuasive, as pure. But the company brought to his work a conviction that it could not bring to the older man's.

Phyllis Lamhut's work, by contrast, depicts human beings as trapped within systems of power they cannot escape or understand. What they are really trapped within is her own system of expressionist cliches. Lamhut has set two dances on the company in the past year, Sacred Conversations (1993), a solo for artistic director Carla Maxwell, and Fantomes (1994). Fagan's dignified work is in some sense a descendant of Limon's. Work more alien than Lamhut's to either man's is hard to imagine.