Robinson Company Honors McKayle’s Social Commentary

Long on talk, short on action, a Cal State L.A. program Saturday by Denver’s Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company honored the achievements of UC Irvine’s Donald McKayle, widely respected as a choreographer for Broadway, films and modern dance companies and as an inspiration for generations of dance students.

Best known for gritty social commentary, McKayle is a highly sophisticated dance maker, one who can meld or alternate formal movement statements with evocations and sometimes direct adaptations of folklore. These qualities emerged at full intensity in “Blood Memories,” his intriguing 1995 revision of an omnibus piece choreographed 19 years earlier for the Alvin Ailey company. Accompanied by a Harold Roberts suite ranging from African drums to American rock, it focused on the Nile and Mississippi as centers of community life, tracing the evolution of the black experience in relation to these waterways.

With Susan Richardson serving as central river-spirit, the choreography sketched many varying social contexts as backdrops to showpiece solos and duets--each one thematically pertinent and creatively distinctive. Many, many choreographers have attempted African roots panoramas, but few repay attention as generously as McKayle’s, whether you’re watching the soulful Cedric Flynt pay tribute to Muslim spirituality in “Desert Prayer,” Marceline Freeman tearing herself apart with grief in “Levee Blues” or the equally gorgeous Nejla Yatkin and Carlos dos Santos getting joyously entangled on “Tar Beach.”

Awfully steamy stuff for 1952, McKayle’s “Nocturne” elegantly and atmospherically celebrated physical beauty, athletic prowess and the energies culminating in copulation. Music by Louis Hardin (a.k.a. “Moondog”) added jazz seasoning to dances that seemed determined not to be generalized and swoony, but to build through specific and often complex movement details: small hops-in-place and sharply defined torso action, for example. Dos Santos and Richardson expertly led the nine-member cast.

At age 28, the company boasts a number of highly accomplished soloists, a purposeful repertory and an enlightened if overly talkative artistic director. Its program Saturday represented one more confirmation of the Luckman Fine Arts Complex as a center for artistic discovery in the local community.