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Philadanco at Perelman Theater
Fire and range
(and a full house, too)
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
Like the Liberty Bell, The Philadelphia Dance Company is one of those local treasures that Philadelphia audiences have long taken for granted. “They think we’ll always be here,” Philadanco’s founder and executive artistic director, Joan Myers Brown, once remarked to me. Dance audiences across the country and in Europe (where Philadanco consistently sells out) understand that this troupe is not to be missed when it’s in town. Yet with just two short runs a week at its home in the Perelman Theater, Philadanco has long had trouble filling the house.
Maybe the hometown crowd is getting a clue, because in November the company finished a mostly sell-out week here. Brown’s company is stronger than ever with several new principals, and this concert displayed plenty of range and fire.
The modern classicism in Joyce Trisler’s 1968 work Dance for Six is a clean academic study, derivative of both Paul Taylor and George Balanchine. Originally made for pointe work, this movement study demonstrates technique, pacing and partnering, but by this late date it can tend to be rote in performance. Here, though, the six dancers caught the vaulting airiness of the Vivaldi score, and Trisler’s precision is shown in the clarity of the critical transitional steps.
Robert Moses’s premiere, The Foul, scored to neo-soul poetry and music of Carl Hancock Rux, is a melodrama about the complexities of relationships. Connections and breakups play out in a series of duets. Odara N. Jubali-Nash was the standout. Jubali-Nash also essayed all of the past and present connotations in excerpts from Ronald K. Brown’s For Truth, in which spiritual faith stands up to the physical and emotional indignities of servitude.
Three women are bent over in The Chosen, moving their arms as if they’re stirring a cauldron. Jubali-Nash flies into expressive movement; eventually she leaps around the other women, who start to dance in turn, themselves liberated by her courage. Heaven, the section for three males, though powerfully danced, seemed ponderous and incomplete.
Part of the appeal this time has to be Christopher Huggins’s electrifying Enemy at the Gates, which became an instant Philadanco classic when it was introduced five years ago, just before 9/11. Huggins brings its broad theme of enemies among us into sharp symbolic focus. The choreography is grounded in athletically modern movement that keeps evolving into a thematic thriller that speaks to our time. The prologue calls for 14 dancers (dressed in black uniforms with short red-lined skirts), seemingly regimented but simmering under Steve Reich’s shadowy score. Reich’s sound field explodes, as does Huggins’s choreographic matrix. Who is an ally, who is seditious and who an enemy? Those issues are played out by the ensemble, whose breakneck precision and steely technique grab you by the throat.
(and a full house, too)
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
Like the Liberty Bell, The Philadelphia Dance Company is one of those local treasures that Philadelphia audiences have long taken for granted. “They think we’ll always be here,” Philadanco’s founder and executive artistic director, Joan Myers Brown, once remarked to me. Dance audiences across the country and in Europe (where Philadanco consistently sells out) understand that this troupe is not to be missed when it’s in town. Yet with just two short runs a week at its home in the Perelman Theater, Philadanco has long had trouble filling the house.
Maybe the hometown crowd is getting a clue, because in November the company finished a mostly sell-out week here. Brown’s company is stronger than ever with several new principals, and this concert displayed plenty of range and fire.
The modern classicism in Joyce Trisler’s 1968 work Dance for Six is a clean academic study, derivative of both Paul Taylor and George Balanchine. Originally made for pointe work, this movement study demonstrates technique, pacing and partnering, but by this late date it can tend to be rote in performance. Here, though, the six dancers caught the vaulting airiness of the Vivaldi score, and Trisler’s precision is shown in the clarity of the critical transitional steps.
Robert Moses’s premiere, The Foul, scored to neo-soul poetry and music of Carl Hancock Rux, is a melodrama about the complexities of relationships. Connections and breakups play out in a series of duets. Odara N. Jubali-Nash was the standout. Jubali-Nash also essayed all of the past and present connotations in excerpts from Ronald K. Brown’s For Truth, in which spiritual faith stands up to the physical and emotional indignities of servitude.
Three women are bent over in The Chosen, moving their arms as if they’re stirring a cauldron. Jubali-Nash flies into expressive movement; eventually she leaps around the other women, who start to dance in turn, themselves liberated by her courage. Heaven, the section for three males, though powerfully danced, seemed ponderous and incomplete.
Part of the appeal this time has to be Christopher Huggins’s electrifying Enemy at the Gates, which became an instant Philadanco classic when it was introduced five years ago, just before 9/11. Huggins brings its broad theme of enemies among us into sharp symbolic focus. The choreography is grounded in athletically modern movement that keeps evolving into a thematic thriller that speaks to our time. The prologue calls for 14 dancers (dressed in black uniforms with short red-lined skirts), seemingly regimented but simmering under Steve Reich’s shadowy score. Reich’s sound field explodes, as does Huggins’s choreographic matrix. Who is an ally, who is seditious and who an enemy? Those issues are played out by the ensemble, whose breakneck precision and steely technique grab you by the throat.
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