DANCE REVIEW : African-American Identity Explored by Choreographers

At exactly the moment when it is changing from a two-city California event into a national project, the “Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century” festival has taken a long look backward.

Appearing in San Diego for the first time, the festival brought to the Lyceum Theatre on Thursday a five-part exploration of heritage, with choreographers from different generations probing the history, values and cultural resources that shape African-American identity.

This focus could be temporary: Only two of the choreographers on the San Diego program are scheduled in the upcoming Los Angeles version of the festival (April 23-26 at the Wadsworth Theater). But the emphasis on roots turned the Thursday program from the usual kaleidoscope into a spectrum, with even the weakest pieces fitting in.

Discovery of the evening: Maia Claire Garrison, a soloist of fierce authority who dissects traditional African tribal dances with a scientist’s eye, discarding all their rich anthropological significances and keeping only their spectacular movement ideas. Danced to Tom Rossi’s live percussion, the result approximates the radical reordering of priorities that Merce Cunningham began in modern dance.

You could call Garrison’s style post-African, but what’s in a name? She originally announced a work titled non-verbally “( )” for the festival but instead danced “--------” on Thursday. (Her “(...)” is scheduled for the Los Angeles performances.) Perhaps dance critics should adopt her system and review her accordingly: “!!!!!”

In “Pacing,” Milton Myers created a sleek, conservative group showpiece from the juxtaposition of European and African vocabularies. Arabesques and back-hinges, fugal patterning and mass undulation: These resources now belong to all American choreographers. You could argue, however, that Myers’ four-part suite merely exploited the obvious contrasts and never achieved the fusion sought by everyone from Twyla Tharp to Alonzo King.

Danced with care and even suavity to a delicate taped score by Frances Bebey, “Pacing” introduced local audiences to Dallas Black Dance Theater, a 16-year-old company that also performed Kevin Jeff’s brief, challenging “Obsession.” Here, in surging abstractions of pain and rage, Jeff evoked a society in turmoil, with glimpses of people reaching out, trying to escape--and being crushed, one by one.

The dancing looked under-rehearsed (expressively cautious, technically ragged), but enough remained to confirm Jeff as one of this country’s most accomplished, and least known, choreographers of color.

Two works from previous “Black Choreographers” festivals completed the program, each stretching beyond conventional definitions of dance. A theater-ritual saturated in smoke and projection effects, John Pickett’s “Things Fall Apart” sought to depict African colonialism as a mutually exhausting pas de deux for nearly naked males.

Performed by members of Pickett’s Spotted Leopard Dance Company, “Things Fall Apart” boasted a moody taped score by John Zorn plus production values galore, but danced around key issues of sexuality: that woman-in-chiffon gliding across the stage, for instance, versus those two guys locked in one another’s arms.

Pickett came close to portraying colonialism as a fantasy mating-dance, with attraction and manipulation on both sides, but somehow held back from the blazing candor that marked the contributions to this festival in the past by Bill T. Jones and Donald Byrd, among others. In the process, he may have confused more people than he intrigued.

David Rousseve also courted ambiguity in his “Colored Children Flyin’ By” but eventually, inevitably, he created an unforgettable statement about his debt to the past through bold shifts between text and dance, between the experiences and personality of an articulate, hyper-kinetic, young man of the 1990s and the slow, unsparing reminiscences of a Creole sharecropper from two generations ago.

“Everybody’s got something in life they love more than themselves,” Rousseve rasped in the hoarse voice of his grandmother. To her, it was a relative savagely raped. To him, it was the “afflicted” pet rat he owned as a child--and, more recently, friends dying of AIDS. Tracing a family legacy of compassion, Rousseve layered lifetimes and identities until, in a disturbing, visionary nude scene, he became his grandmother in body as well as spirit.

From the first festival in 1989, “Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century” has been plagued by questions--whether it ghettoizes participating artists, for instance, by segregating them from non-blacks of similar philosophy and achievement.

However, at a time of dismal touring prospects for all American choreographers, the ultimate issue is access: getting David Rousseve seen outside New York before he reaches his grandmother’s age. Some of us are just practical and greedy enough to be grateful that the ghetto is going national.