Yorke Project Carries on Lewitzky’s Legacy

It’s never surprising to find the restless creativity and focus on pure movement values that distinguished Bella Lewitzky’s style of modern dance reflected in choreography by her former company members. She was a great teacher and her dancers learned their lessons well.

At the Colburn School on Saturday, the Lewitzky legacy could be found not only in works performed by the seven-woman Yorke Dance Project (founded in 1997, the year the Lewitzky company disbanded), but also in choreography created for children of the school.

In “Ready Set Gone,” Yorke Dance Project founder and former Lewitzky dancer Yolande Yorke-Edgell devised a sunny structuralist romp to taped music by Steve Reich.

Three sets of women in black (two in T-shirts, two in halter tops, two in long-sleeved pullovers) formed isolated movement cadres that eventually, inevitably, inventively mixed and merged.

Yorke-Edgell’s “Tailored” (to taped music by Alessandro Marcello) displayed the same interest in formal contrasts--here the playoff between two dancers dressed as neo-Baroque cavaliers and two as sprightly wenches.

Even in the same dance, Kristen Wilkinson and Jennifer Flanagan stayed in one world, Kristen Brown and Samantha Robinson in another, separated by class and the illusion of gender differences.

But in Diana MacNeil’s “Sisters,” Robinson, Wilkinson and Flanagan belonged to the same dancing family, joining Yorke-Edgell, Yvette Wulff and Shelby Williams in brief, deft etudes set to two Stravinsky piano pieces.

Joined by Shane Summers and Charlotte Dutton, guest Kay Min attended to Stravinsky skillfully, while the dancers sustained the fiction of making up their choreography on the spot.

Ex-Lewitzky dancers MacNeil and Roger Gonzalez Hibner appeared as guests with the Yorke contingent, dancing MacNeil’s intense duet “Canta/Levantar” to recordings by the Balanescu Quartet.

Beginning with movement snapshots separated by blackouts, the duet soon connected those initial images in a nonlinear portrait of a relationship. Unusual concepts of support sometimes imposed extreme contortions on MacNeil and equally challenging partnering feats on Gonzalez Hibner, both exemplary.

They also turned up in the charming, chaotic “Dorm Mice,” a collaborative product of a two-week Colburn summer workshop. It enlisted MacNeil and Yorke-Edgell as the elders in an eight-member, multigenerational slumber party and Gonzalez Hibner as the resident boogeyman. But its finest achievement came from the musicianship of Ai Nihira, Grace An and Cynthia Gong in a trio by Joseph Haydn.

Under the direction of Karen Lundgren, the 13-player Colburn flute choir premiered “Suite Butterfly.”

This three-part nature study by Phyllis Avidan Louke began with hurdy-gurdy sonorities, grew mysterious in its central section and then cheerily dance-like. But the Yorke dancers sat this one out.