DANCE REVIEWS : New Generation Discovers Lewitzky in Retrospective

Onstage at the Japan America Theatre, Lori McWilliams stretches and coils along the floor: the intuitive, serpentine embodiment of a mercurial adagio from Ginastera’s first piano sonata.

As the music expands in scale, McWilliams surges through big running/swooping passages, high reaches, bold kicks. In her scarlet one-piece bathing suit, she creates a spectacle of molten torso action and formal limb fireworks--her dancing so perfectly attuned to the choreographer’s needs that you’d guess this solo was made for her.

Guess again. Bella Lewitzky choreographed “Kineasonata” in 1970; McWilliams joined Lewitzky’s company 15 years later. What you’re watching in this four-part Saturday retrospective is a new generation of Lewitzky dancers discovering the challenges and opportunities of her early successes.

A stylish, buoyant music visualization for the full, 10-member company, “Kineasonata” still exudes freshness, from every shimmering fingertip in the ensembles to all those twisty jumps that Theodora M. Fredericks executes so brilliantly.

More problematic: the clash of styles in “Pietas,” Lewitzky’s anti-war dance drama from 1971 in which alternately numbed and frantic masses huddle under the onslaught of gunfire and bombs (dangers evoked though lighting effects and the sound-score by Cara Bradbury Marcus).

Of course, war looms as large in 1991 as it did 20 years ago--but Lewitzky’s ironic treatment of Christian imagery in her central duet belongs to a different choreographic epoch from her use of pedestrian motion and desperate wheeling-in-place in the group sequences. Only technical bravado links Nancy Lanier and Walter Kennedy’s weighty statue-manipulation gambits with the precociously postmodern outer sections of the piece.

“Ceremony for Three” (1972) and “Song of the Woman” (1982) each suffer in revival--largely due to the evolution in attitudes about gender since they were choreographed.

Set to a spare, moody Marcus score, the indomitably propulsive, angular “Ceremony” assigns contrasting solos to John Pennington, Ken Talley and Kennedy. Male force, energy and athleticism are the primary issues here--just as female softness, roundness and emotional depth represent core concepts of “Woman.”

But ‘90s dancers don’t always identify with gender archetypes. And perhaps that’s why Diana MacNeil seems unusually pinched and dry in “Song of the Woman,” alert to every shift in movement impetus, but never the earthmother depicted in Larry Attaway’s lush accompaniment (incorporating a poem by Gabriella Mistral). The men in “Ceremony for Three” also look a little trapped in their quasi-gladitorial roles, attracted to the movement detail but estranged from the prevailing message.

You can’t blame them. After all, there’s no room for male sensitivity in “Ceremony” and no place for female power in “Woman.” To safeguard the genuine choreographic invention of these pieces, maybe Lewitzky should consider letting McWilliams, Lanier and Fredericks tackle “Ceremony” and Pennington interpret “Woman” (as a reverie, rather than a character portrait). That, truly, would be something to see.