Avaz: Adventuresome Travels

The new generation of world-dance specialists may value exhaustive field research above all other virtues. But inspired stagecraft can be just as important as enlightened scholarship when assembling a program from dances belonging to different cultures and centuries. And it’s often much rarer.

The latest example turned up Saturday, when the adventuresome, locally based Avaz International Dance Theatre shuffled new and familiar pieces from Iran, Central Asia, Turkey and Armenia into an event called “Court, Manor and Village” at the Japan America Theatre. Strongly executed, its schematic arrangement made sense academically but proved theatrically problematic.

For starters, most of the dynamic, large-scale folk dancing, and much of the male prowess of the company, could be found only at the end of the evening (the “village” section), while the beginning sagged under an overload of soft, static, symmetrical, lyric dances of the classical tradition: individually very pretty but soon numbing in combination.

Even the ambitious new “Charkh: Turning in Time,” by co-artistic director Jamal, suffered from organizational weaknesses. Attempting to depict the centrality of verse in Iranian life, the suite layered antique Rumi poems (read in two languages) on top of a lush but rhythmically soggy score (on tape) by Hossain Alizadeh. However this accompaniment seemed irrelevant to the ceremonial hoop- and pole-dances on view.

Only when the dancers shed their gleaming blue capes for dervish-style whirling in white robes--with Karen Ochoa anchoring the surging choreography--did the piece fuse its elements effectively.

But much remained unfinished: The quasi-devotional tone of the piece never successfully expressed the celebration of earthly love--and lovers--in Rumi’s vision. Moreover, the possibilities for combining source-idioms and images in a choreographic montage needed more time, and less verse, to sharpen its creative intent.

Working from a Western postmodern base, choreographer Laura Dean has attempted this kind of contemporary, cross-cultural abstraction, and it might be fascinating to watch Jamal travel the same road from his different starting point. But not yet.

Right now, the impact of “Charkh” comes from its impressionistic evocation of Sufi ritual, and the success of the performance itself less from any artistic overview than the growing prowess of the 18-member ensemble.

Fielding such exemplary soloists as Ochoa, Cay Lundy, Brandy Maya Healy, Edouard Kouzmitch, Chahn Chess and Enrique Gonzalez, the company at last can dance up to the level of Jamal’s richly embellished costumes. But he and founder-director Anthony Shay haven’t yet found a theatrical format to match their 1997 Silk Road program in its conceptual unity and high excitement.

On Saturday, the Central Asian group dances exuded refinement from their fluidly evolving geometry to their choreographic details: all the curling wrists and tiny shoulder shakes, for instance. But the nearly danceless funeral procession from Luristan and other moments of intensity resonated even more strongly. Human emotion may not be high-concept, but it deepens cultural tourism in a way that no mere survey-structure can begin to equal.