DANCE REVIEW : Works by Rousseve

On the ground-floor plaza of the Bradbury Building, two dancers from the David Rousseve company define an anguished, uncertain intimacy through choreography focused on challenging, moment-by-moment shifts of balance.

Directly above, on the second-floor balcony, other dancers reflect key positions of the duet, and these reflections continue upward, on the third, fourth, fifth floors: layers of motion and feeling shaped equally by the Bradbury’s architectural space and Rousseve’s sense of the enduring pain of black America.

Introduced this week by the “Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century” festival, Rousseve’s “Had Me Somebody but I Lost Her Very Young” grounds the obvious novelty of site-specific dance-spectacle in profound historical and religious experience.

When Rousseve sings of his heritage and energetic choral responses echo from above, the Bradbury becomes a black church at a particularly intense moment of affirmation.

And when B. J. Crosby sings “Amazing Grace” from the top of the elevator shaft and then descends (still singing) to a plaza covered with smoke and grotesquely disembodied human limbs, we are suddenly Dante and Virgil glimpsing all the levels between heaven and hell.

Using an arsenal of dance idioms and staging techniques, Rousseve weaves Arceneaux’s story and his own into a single statement: “Everybody got something in life they love more than themselves.”

The Rousseve company will perform a related work at the Wadsworth Theater in Westwood, through Sunday.