Dance : ‘Indomitable’ Embodies Enduring Spirit of Women

Like the pioneers who settled this continent, the women who created modern dance were consumed by a sense of manifest destiny. As they extended the frontiers of the art, the previous year’s creative landmarks were left behind.

Some artists who followed made attempts at repertory conservation and preservation--Alvin Ailey, for example. However, the idea of a living archive, of dancers-as-historians, only took root after the first- and second-generation masters of the art left the stage forever.

At Cal State Los Angeles on Friday, Los Angeles Dance Theatre presented eight women’s solos dating from 1907 to 1944. Founded in 1978 by Martha Graham principal Bonnie Oda Homsey, the company always honored modern dance history but found its niche just last year with its commemorative “Weeping Women” program at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

No less memorable, its new “Indomitable Spirit of Woman” program explores the broadest, most inclusive definition of feminism, with an emphasis on heroic self-sufficiency and endurance.

At the beginning, as Risa Steinberg skips through Isadora Duncan’s “Sicilienne,” a hand-me-down quaintness replaces the work’s original impact and you have to remind yourself of Duncan’s daring achievements--notably the liberation of women’s bodies. Soon, however, the pieces bridge past and present with astonishing immediacy.

Around 1917, Eve Gentry, then 7 years old, saw a Los Angeles woman scavenging for food. In the late 1930s, she turned the memory into “Tenant of the Street,” a stark solo performed to city noise. Today, a P.C. choreographer would sentimentalize the woman, but Gentry knew that poverty brutalizes and made her subject the alarming product of a grim environment.

Invaluable to the work’s reconstruction before Gentry’s death last year, guest Mary Anne Santos Newhall performs “Tenant of the Street” with great strength and, of course, relevance to the L.A. of 1995.

As ironic counterpoint, Eleanor King’s “To the West” (1943) shapes proud, grand-scale body sculpture from the dreams of freedom that led Easterners to this coast. It proves Steinberg’s most indelible contribution to the program, though she also finds the emotional resonance in the formal contrast between circular descent and pointed ascent in Doris Humphrey’s finely wrought “Two Ecstatic Themes” (1931).

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Company co-director Janet Eilber (another former Graham luminary) assumes two wildly dissimilar roles: an abstraction of suffering that Graham created in response to the Spanish Civil War (“Deep Song,” 1937) and a comic ballerina-in-distress that Agnes de Mille conjured up at the very start of her career (“Debut at the Opera,” 1928). The technical extremes alone make the pairing a tour de force, but Eilber endows even De Mille’s tutued ninny with credible resilience.

Besides interpreting Jane Dudley’s “Cante Flamenco” (1944) with a potent sense of self-empowerment, Oda Homsey assumes the program’s most controversial challenge: five sections from Helen Tamiris’ “Negro Spirituals.” Created between 1928 and 1932, the pieces express reverence, rebellion against oppression and life-affirming humor, drawing their inspiration from classic African American song-texts.

But Tamiris wasn’t black, so does the work appropriate something she never should have touched or does it represent an enlightened artist’s wake-up call to Eurocentric white America? Certainly Tamiris’ greatness and the deep integrity of Oda Homsey’s performance make the work much more than a historical footnote to Ailey’s “Revelations”--danced the same night across town.

It clearly bothers some people to see pink-skinned, blonde-haired Jonathan Phelps of the Ailey company dancing “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham” as if to the manner born. But Ailey always said that African American culture can be shared by everyone. Still, the question remains: Was that judgment retroactive?