Offering Gestures in Time

In the annual parade of Black History Month dance events, the Philadanco modern dance company inevitably sets new standards for breadth of vision and originality of expression.

Showcasing choreographers passionately exploring African American identity along with provocative dance-makers who just happen to be black, Joan Myers Brown’s versatile Philadelphians are a magnet for creative risk and innovation--qualities abundant in a four-part program at El Camino College on Friday.

Not everything worked equally well, but in David Brown’s visionary “Labess II” and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s celebratory “Hand Singing Song,” Philadanco introduced imaginative, finely crafted ensemble pieces of wide appeal.

Setting evolving geometric corps patterns against airy a cappella music by Zap Mama (like the dancing, a blend of African and Western influences), “Labess II” managed to keep its formalism remarkably fluid and free of rigidity.

The piece began with Dawn Marie Watson being lowered from a lift by a line (front to back) of six dancers. And as that line coiled and spun out and splintered into a chain of duets, Watson served as the fulcrum or focus of the dance’s majestic spatial design.

A supple and even sensual use of the body humanized Brown’s structuralism, not so much softening his emphasis on unison execution and symmetrical formations as suggesting the harmony of motion that might exist in a world of perfect order.

Zollar’s past work has often been stronger as theater than dance, but “Hand Singing Song” carved forceful whole-body statements out of the gestural material that she chose as her subject. Looking at handshakes and other social actions through which African Americans define themselves, she created a mime-based ensemble vehicle that ranged from the playful (a hokeypokey sequence) to the political (the upraised fist of Black Power solidarity).

The flipped wrist, the ambling strut, the scolding finger, the Voguing stance, the loose-limbed physicality of jazz musicians: Using a score by Michael Wimberly, “Hand Singing Song” reshaped all these movement artifacts into rhythmic dances expressing what Zollar’s spoken text called the inimitably “stylistic way” that African Americans communicate.

Obviously, Western theater dance has a long tradition of saturating dances with character or folk gesture. But it’s usually an outsider’s game, and Zollar not only belongs to the people she portrays but also seeks to convey something more essential than entertaining mannerisms: the deep creative impulse in the most commonplace human interactions.

Ronald K. Brown’s “Exotica” offered its own sketches of African American style, attempting to break down stereotypes by juxtaposing images of violence and anguish to traditional affirmations of faith such as the ballad “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

Brown built ensemble sequences inventively, highlighting the density of the dancing with moments of stillness or documentary motion (people wandering across the stage as if on a street). But this excerpt from a full-evening work lurched uncomfortably from pop-influenced divertissement to somber social portraiture, and back.

Moreover, Wunmi’s costumes proved curiously backdated, with crushed velours and Afro wigs on view, as if what we saw somehow needed to be placed in some other time than the present.

Although the title and program note for Bebe Miller’s “My Science” encouraged you to think about “heavy water, the collision of matter and the mechanics of relationship,” the piece used rock and Bulgarian music to accompany another turbulent and ultimately despairing Miller essay on contemporary sexual politics.

Women watching and approaching men who refused to commit to anything other than a defensive isolation opened and closed the piece. In between came other facets of female frustration, male anger and Miller’s engulfing, flyaway physicality. The company danced with great authority here, with Antonio Sisk and Tracy Vogt especially prominent as the first couple to meet, tussle and part.