Rousseve Finds His Rhythm in Storytelling

When choreographer David Rousseve was a child, he had outrageous dreams, he said early in his impeccably staged, emotionally burnished solo show at the Getty Museum on Friday night.

At his first day of “integrated school” in Texas, he almost blurted out his real ambition: to become “a fat black lady who sang gospel.” Surrounded by unknown white people, he thought better and spoke of a civil rights role model instead. He was rewarded by the teacher, whose “you’re a credit to your race” comment tipped him off about future compromises.

Rousseve’s “The Ten Year Chat,” named for its excerpts from a decade of his work, and also featuring recent choreography, resounded with poignant reflections of split-personality-making decisions like this early one. In autobiographical monologues that dotted the 80-minute piece, he also told about the days when he longed for sophisticated soap opera roles after graduating from Princeton, but found himself cast repeatedly as a domestic or, one memorable time, “a primitive jungle native in a Pampers-influenced loincloth.”

Nor did he escape pervasive categories in the dance world. The glitzy jazz dancing he first loved wasn’t art, the modern and postmodern gatekeepers told him. But meaning gets lost in too much non-sequitur abstraction, Rousseve indicated, illustrating with a sample of release-based “noodling” that drew knowing laughs. His compromise was to combine his “artsy” and “tacky” sides in dance segments from a new work called “The Jazz Project.”

They were a seamless, invigorating fusion of loose-limbed, quirky syncopation and the rhythmic snap of classical tap. Recordings of Billy Strayhorn’s elegant jazz compositions fit the mood perfectly.

Rousseve’s use of text and storytelling illuminated other themes that emerged--the loss of a dream, the loss of love through cruelty, the succor of love and remembrance.

Making occasional onstage changes in darkness from jeans to loose, silky pants to underwear or nothing at all, Rousseve was illuminated stunningly by the hallowing hues of David Ferri’s lighting. Along the way, he revived his eloquent sharecropping grandmother (from “The Creole Series”) and a fictional AIDS patient who yearns for his father’s love (from “The Dream Series”).

The characterizations were often broad, not naturalistic; Rousseve sometimes seems to sing his speeches and, when he’s himself, projects with relentless brightness. Yet the stylized moods worked, making transitions from talking to dancing seem plausible, whether he disintegrated into gesture from one agonized utterance or launched a steely sculptural monologue that made physical his thoughts and emotion.

In “The Ten Year Chat,” Rousseve has woven a wistful but sturdy fabric of exploration and revelation.

He presented the words of his ancestral mentors as poetry, made mourning into memorable gesture and danced with intelligent abandon.

Looking up, he seemed to see the same moon that sustained his grandmother during dark times and, through Rousseve’s creation, still sheds a little encouraging light on all of us.