Moses Dominates With Superb Solos

Robert Moses creates jewel-like dances built on classical form and enhanced by swivels, quirks and reverent pauses. Whether he’s using richly romantic taped music or rap (his selection of which is equally romantic), his carefully crafted lyricism contains moments of calm for reflecting, questioning or gathering strength.

On Friday night, Moses and his small San Francisco-based company, Kin, shared the bill with Donna Sternberg & Dancers at the Strub Theatre of Loyola Marymount University in Westchester. While Moses worked in a forward-thinking and affecting idiom, the two Sternberg pieces, “Emerging” and “Weaving Our Ancestors Voices,” were mired in distressingly naive modern dance cliches.

On a program plagued by order changes and tedious pauses between pieces, Moses’ work was worth waiting for. His weakest point may be costuming--Tristan Ching in the duet “This State of Annihilation,” and the three women backing up elegant soloist Tiani Frias with ecstatic, rite-like semaphore in “The Supplicant,” were hampered by long dresses of misshapen cloth.

Moses himself was perhaps most impressive in two solos. Just getting warmed up in “Shard,” he seemed to be setting himself tasks, leaping, unfolding into elegant shapes, embodying stillness. In “Never Solo,” to the Last Poets’ mellifluous, bongo-filled rap, Moses let the jazzy rhetoric of black enfranchisement flow over him, spinning with it, letting it pull his arms into an electric boogie riff, matching its verbal and musical buoyancy with what he does best, superb and thoughtful dancing.