DANCE REVIEW : Fagan Company at El Camino College

Onstage at El Camino College, Garth Fagan’s dancers are in a tight cluster, shuffling mechanically to piano jazz by Don Pullen. Sudden turns, kicks, half-crouches suggest the idea of flinching--and soon a mass collapse to the floor and a slow, painful reaching out of hands adds an edge of beaten helplessness.

This opening sequence from “Until, By & If” represents a startling departure for Fagan. After spending 20 years building a company that has radically extended modern dance virtuosity, why is he now using movement that nearly anyone could do?

Obviously because he doesn’t want us to see these as exceptional beings. Not yet, anyway. In the second (duets) section of this four-part, 50-minute masterwork, Fagan’s use of gymnastics and especially asymmetrical balances becomes characteristically daring--but even here the six couples remain linked by reiterated proletarian gestural motifs and by their compulsive involvement in ordinary pop dancing.

There’s no joy, however, either in these dances or relationships. Taking from poet Derek Walcott the line, “until your winters grow more kind,” Fagan creates a bleak social portrait. Because of the particular tensions and solidarities he defines (as well as the predominately African-American cast), “Until, By & If” seems to be a lament for black America in the ‘90s.

In this winter of discontent, we see stifled, disempowered, deeply alienated people engaged in manipulating one another or releasing their rage in assaultive social dancing.

After intermission comes an alternative, again suggested by Walcott: “by the dancing firelight of mind.” At first we see something like a dream sequence, with couples in filmy, sleeveless blue pajamas showing us the most playful and tender interactions. The phenomenal Norwood Pennewell and Natalie Rogers lead the group with their rapturous, wiggly duet full of technical fireworks--including spectacular turning circle kicks.

Soon, the dancers’ clothes look more like streetwear and their movement more like jazz dancing--but Fagan purges that debased idiom of sexism and vulgarity.

Once again, he presents a social panorama, one in which women sometimes lift men, in which same-sex partnerships flourish, in which Latin rhythms release movement from deep within the torso and couples are given inventive individual statements within a strife-free group infrastructure.

Remarkably, there’s no final unison display of muscles and teeth--no Broadway fascism. “Until, By & If” may end with an uplifting vision of pop culture--and America--but it knows the realities too well to lose itself in mindless celebration. Its reach is wide and deep, and it demands from both Fagan and the dancers extraordinary new expressive resources. The company’s next 20 years should be very interesting. . . .

Completing the Wednesday program at El Camino: “Traipsing Through the May,” Fagan’s familiar 1987 romp to Vivaldi, with Pennewell again brilliant at making his impossible balances and superhuman jumps-in-place look not just easy but whimsical. Valentina Alexander again unifies the piece with her broad parody of stage glamour.

The Fagan company appears in different programs at Occidental College on Feb. 2 and at Cal State Northridge on Feb. 3.