Big ideas and salvation

A cross between John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations,” choreographer Winifred R. Harris’ new dance, “Joy Comes in the Morning,” successfully takes on some big ideas. Pursuing personal redemption and creating a community are among the themes of the roughly 100-minute work, which was premiered and performed without intermission by Harris’ Between Lines company Sunday at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood.

Guiding the flow, poet Sonje Marie sat onstage, interweaving her original poems and excerpts from works by Lebanese mystic Kahlil Gibran and others between or within the dance sections. Witty, provocative, overflowing with conviction and energy, Marie advocated a joyous, pull-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps philosophy.

St. Augustine’s anguished confession that he was unable to do the good he wanted to do (while always impelled to commit the sin he wanted to avoid) formed little if any part of Marie’s viewpoint. When she joined the eight dancers in the sassy, sinuous finale, you could almost believe salvation was that easy.

To be sure, problems in balancing spoken words and music sometimes obscured Marie, although she was amplified, so some of the complexity of what she was saying may have been obscured as well. The dancers, who were not amplified, often fared even worse in projecting their spoken remarks about their childhood church experiences and current beliefs.

The work was divided into nine sections, with titles such as “Finding My Way,” “In the Mist of Chaos,” “Transformation” and “Heaven, a State of Mind.” The music included recorded songs by Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, Sam Cooke and others, including Marie.

Because there was only a general narrative framework, the dance became a series of states of being, and here Harris found appropriate movement to externalize feelings. The moves included drunken reeling in the search section; one individual’s steadfast refusal to join in the gospel-flavored dancing (was this an ironic gloss on Ailey’s most famous dance?); and, perhaps most wondrously, the community building, in which the dancers clustered together in support and creativity.

Some sections, possibly driven by the length of the songs, went on too long, however, and the work itself also seemed to end several times before its actual finish, with one climax following another. Maybe this was meant to suggest the endless waves of ecstasy that are part of paradise.

All the dancers were powerful, but arguably Adrian Young, who has been with Harris for a decade, most embodied the choreographer’s distinctive movement style, which combines weight and clarity with speed and focused articulations. Quinn Morton, Alyssa Marrin and Laura Laser were also strong soloists. Completing the ensemble were Olivia Miles, Kelly Gill, Laura Karklina and Lavinia Findikoglu.

Harris and Stephanie Haines created the colorful costumes, which were different for almost every section. Kathy O’Donohue lighted the dance sensitively.

The title of the work presumably came from a line in Psalm 30: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” There didn’t seem to be a great deal of weeping, but there was a lot of joy.

chris.pasles@latimes.com