Dance Review : ‘Black Choreographers’: Moving, but Not Progressing

Just as with opening night this year, the final Sunday afternoon program in the annual “Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century” festival at Cal State L.A. had no artistic direction to speak of--only a commitment to something for everyone.

The event, part of the first season at the new Luckman Fine Arts Complex, tried to build audiences by offering MTV-level cheap thrills. But it also wanted to showcase mainstream artists never before seen in Los Angeles and give local unknowns a chance to perform. And, yes, it also attempted to fulfill its original mission: to prove that African Americans have always been central to the avant-garde.

The scattershot five-part program began with “Morning Songs,” a 1991 jazz ballet by Talley Beatty, a pioneer of African American dance. Set to hot, ominous music by Charles Mingus, it developed a vocabulary of technical display into an increasingly threatening statement of group power--a divertissement with an edge, perfectly suited to the energy and flair of the Philadanco company from Pennsylvania.

Midway through: a depiction of gang rape. Ironically, Beatty’s stylized sexual assault proved far less brutal than the supposed lovemaking in “Naked Perfume,” the Dwight Rhoden duet for his Ohio-based Complexions company. Using a giant picture frame as both a design element and a support for some of the heavy-breathing gymnastics and contortions crammed into the piece, Rhoden created a deliriously sleazy nightclub adagio that ended with Antonio Carlos Scott pulling off Christina Johnson’s top and Johnson reaching into Scott’s shorts.

Scott also supplied the music for the piece, and Johnson (a guest from Dance Theatre of Harlem) contributed meticulous pointe work and a sense of dignity that seemed positively miraculous under the circumstances.

Between Beatty’s and Rhoden’s balletic flamboyances came “Crow,” a fluid, sweetly personal modern dance solo by L. Martina Young, a former fixture of the local scene who now lives in Nevada.

The piece, an excerpt from “In the Company of Angels,” used dance as a counterpoint to a text that began with memories of political action--”everybody I knew was in the movement”--and then expanded the scope of the word movement until it fused with the choreography in a statement of artistic liberation.

Unfortunately, Steve Moshier’s score sometimes obliterated the text, but the dancing stayed eloquent nonetheless.

Three writers and three composers created the text and music used in “Stained Glass,” an overambitious dance-theater spectacle by local emerging artist Samuel Donlavy. Dealing with institutional and societal homophobia and AIDS, it began promisingly as bold protest drama but quickly grew into a woozy ensemble vehicle in which the melodramatic pantomime suffering of two men contrasted with the menacing unison paroxysms of a women’s corps. Eventually, their twitching infected everyone; the piece ended with Donlavy alone onstage, pleading for sympathy between spasms. Obviously a sincere effort, but just as obviously over the top and not yet ready for a premiere in a major venue.

Completing the program: Winifred R. Harris’ “When Wet Came to Paper,” a work praised more than once in these pages.