DANCE REVIEW : Byrd Dominates ‘Black Choreographers’

You have to hand it to the choreographers who were willing to risk showing their work alongside that of the brilliant Donald Byrd. Three artists opted to do just that in the “Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century” festival, Thursday at the Lyceum Theatre.

Although comparisons are odious, they are inevitable, and all but one of these risk-takers were simply blown away by his work.

It wasn’t just because Byrd’s dancers (the Group) moved with power and crystalline clarity, investing the choreography with dramatic characterization. It was also that Byrd provided more arresting movement ideas per minute than any of the others--or just about anyone else, for that matter.

The company danced the first two parts of Byrd’s “Drastic Cuts,” which is now a four-part work, according to a spokeswoman for the theater. The section of frenetic, frustrated sexual couplings reviewed last year in Los Angeles is now preceded by a section almost austerely dominated by movement study.

But, of course, it’s not that simple. Four men march in hand-on-shoulder, chorus-line solidarity, yet give the most delicate reverences when, by turn, Stephanie Guiland, Ruthlyn Salomons and April Wanstall lead them in an aerobic/ballet class to Mio Morales’ insistently rhythmic score.

The balleticisms erupt in a dazzling gloss on Balanchine’s intricate partnering with a supremely confident and aloof Wanstall manipulated by Michael Blake, Darrian Ford, Aldawna Morrison and Hector Vega in images that recall “The Four Temperaments” and “Agon.” This is Mr. B’s adage that ballet-is-woman with a vengeance.

At the end, the men are left sprawling, exhausted, in a group grope with one of the other women. Part Two may be the next step. One wonders what Parts Three and Four must be.

Unbelievably, the festival organizers inserted works by other choreographers between the two parts. At least Nia Love-Pointer’s theater piece “POW!” for herself, Donna Duffy, Trabien Pollard and Onye Ozuzu raised interesting, if unanswered, questions about one’s relatedness to the Earth and one’s culture.

But Joanna Hiagood’s swinging on a trapeze to an Edith Piaf song in “Dance for Yal” seemed merely simple-heartedly playful; her miming drunken collapse, tragic emoting and silent laughter in “M,” only a partial reflection of a song sung by Billie Holiday.

Heywood “Woody” McGriff’s solo “Angelitos Negros,” to Roberta Flack’s song of the same name, which opened the program, looked even more arbitrary, despite his lanky expressivity.

The Black Choreographers Moving festival will go to the Japan America Theatre in Los Angeles on May 3-8, with a somewhat different program, including Byrd’s controversial full-evening work “The Minstrel Show.”