Harlem Troupe Taps Its Classical Heritage

Movies that quote, refer to or spin off of other movies are familiar on our screens, so why not ballets that evoke or grow from other ballets?

Three recent home-grown works performed Saturday by Dance Theatre of Harlem at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts not only challenged the dancers’ technique and stamina, but also used the company’s classical heritage as the basis for new creativity.

Lowell Smith’s “A Pas de Deux for Phrygia and Spartacus” proved the most obvious example of this process, adopting the narrative context and Khachaturian score of an enduring Russian beefcake ballet but defining a more intimate and even playful relationship for its two title characters.

Best known as one of the company’s most powerful principals, Smith made fearsome demands on his warrior-hero--heroic solos one moment, sky-sweeping lifts the next--and Duncan Cooper added his own nobility of bearing and dramatic intensity to the role on Saturday night. Tiny Melissa Morrissey danced with the same faultless control and emotional spontaneity that she had displayed in the “South African Suite” duet at the matinee, but Russian women traditionally bring a greater expressive weight to Phrygia than she displayed.

Both Laveen Naidu’s “Viraa” (which means “brave” in Sanskrit) and Robert Garland’s “New Bach” took inspiration from the company’s roots in the Balanchine repertory and neoclassical style. Each began as a plotless, formal showpiece featuring a corps and a central couple, but soon adopted Balanchinean strategies for reflecting and interpreting the music in unpredictable ways.

Using Ernest Bloch’s mercurial Concerto Grosso #2, “Viraa” added twisty contemporary accents to an already formidable neoclassic vocabulary, as well as incorporating bold gestural images: the women’s preening pose, for instance, with hands behind their heads. But Naidu’s response to the score also resulted in a number of emotional statements that never quite became a story but gave each sequence a distinctive mood--exactly as in Balanchine’s “Serenade.”

So the dynamic Andrea Long and the buoyant Eric Underwood sometimes simply stared at one another as the corps surged around them Saturday evening, and in their duets she seemed just as likely to tenderly caress his face or hug his shoulders as straighten up for complex textbook finger-turns.

Underwood and Caroline Rocher led the cast of “New Bach” at the matinee, comfortably embodying the stylistic extremes that Garland developed out of the experiments in Balanchine’s own Bach ballet, “Concerto Barocco,” and other works. Accompanied by Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor, they and their corps colleagues danced with majestic classical composure--until something in the music triggered idiosyncratic outbursts: shoulder-wiggling, hip-rolling, arm-pumping and the like.

Akin to the breezy athleticism of Paul Taylor’s modern dance interpretations of Baroque music, these brief passages caught something in the music beyond its formal perfection, something eternally fresh and free.

Ultimately, then, “New Bach” tried to convey both the elegance of ballet dancing and the less restrained impulses underpinning it--Apollo versus Dionysus, if you like.

A returning favorite, the eight-part “South African Suite,” also thrived on contrasts between different kinds of movement--in this case, the linear elegance of ballet and the multifaceted physicality of traditional African dancing.

Choreographed in 1999 by Naidu, Augustus van Heerden and company co-founder/director Arthur Mitchell, it enlisted nearly two dozen of the company’s finest artists in depictions of everything from animal motion to tribal warfare to African social dances without ever becoming too solemn or too scattered in total effect.

Dancing to a diverse selection of mostly African music, Dionne Figgins, Paunika Jones, Akua Parker, Mark Burns, Ikolo Griffin, Kevin Thomas and Cooper led the cast with great spirit and authority, though nobody matched the impact of Christiane Cristo with her spectacular contortions on pointe.