Philadanco salutes Huggins at the Perelman

I used to know all the faces of all the dancers in this exceptional company— especially after traveling through Poland with them over a few weeks in 2001. But Philadanco’s roster has changed since then, and only one remains from that trip: Roxanne Lyst, who seems to be frozen in time, still capable of pulling out all the stops in every show. I’ve also grown familiar with the budding choreographer Tommie-Waheed Evans, and can tell him the minute he lands onstage. Justin Bryant and Rosita Adamo are familiar to me as well.

But damn. Seeing a company of this world-class stature only twice a year just isn’t fair. If Philadanco were based in Germany or Japan, the troupe would be as well known in its home base as rock stars. But since the Philadelphia audience won’t support it, that’s what Philadelphians get: two weekends a year.

Even in Chile

Philadanco tours incessantly. Just last summer the troupe flew to Santiago— the first American company to perform there. Artistic and founding director Joan Myers Brown had to postpone her flight to Chile for a day to accept the National Medal of Arts from President Obama at the White House, one of many honors and accolades bestowed on this glamorous octogenarian. You should only be so lucky to grow up to be like her.

Brown and her dancers shouldn’t be able to walk down a Philadelphia street without being pelted with flowers and pestered for autographs. They can dance everything from dance theater to contemporary ballet to hip-hop.

Jews in the ghetto

In this concert at the Perelman, they began with a haunting dance theater piece excerpted from The List, a work Huggins set originally on another company. The scene is the home of a Jewish family of four in Kraków in 1941, seated around a kitchen when a letter arrives summoning them to the ghetto. Evans and Lyst are the parents, Elyse Browning and Heather Benson the daughters. Huggins’s choreography showed he had familiarized himself with some aspects of Jewish life and dance. And Lyst, who had accompanied all of us to Auschwitz on that trip to Poland, certainly drew on that experience. But Evans’s performance was no less poignant, and I would love to see the entire work performed by this company. They get too few opportunities to act; The List shows that they can.

Much of The List was performed seated, with abrupt rising and falling back into the chairs, fists pounding the table or raised in the air. But Evans and Lyst embodied grief and fear as they danced off to the side, perhaps out of the children’s earshot. They danced this section to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, in which a mother searches for her son, killed in an uprising.

Boys to men

Huggins’s other musical choices, and how he uses them, are mighty impressive as well. Blue opened with Cantus in Memorium for Benjamin Britten, and here the company’s men in powder blue sleeveless tunics and leggings (designed by Huggins, as he also did for The List) emerge tenderly from boys to men for its six-minute duration. Then, when Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music takes over, the tunics come off and the dancing becomes all testosterone and speed-driven. Huggins gives these virile men as much as they can handle, and they take it over the top with agile jumps, runs and knee-breaking skids, evoking applause and gasps to the very last, when guest artist Levi Philip Marsman executed a daring leap offstage into unseen arms.

When Dawn Comes has Adamo, Janice Beckles, Jennifer Jones and Courtney Robinson lying in a heap as if asleep. They awaken and dance until Cain Coleman enters and dances Jones off with him, sending the others away in a huff. The most astonishing moments came with Jones and Adryan Moorefield. Moorefield’s a big guy in a field of big guys, so when they seductively clash in their duet and he lifts her horizontally and swings her a 360 it’s amazing enough to see her return the favor— except she throws him down splat, like a weightlifter.

Menacing speed

I reviewed The Big Bang for the Inquirer last spring at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. With this second viewing, I saw something I missed (or forgot) last time that had me chortling with delight: Four men hold four squatting women by their elbows and spin them around like satellites. It’s a beautiful moment.

Enemy Behind the Gate, to Steve Reich’s music, is the first piece Huggins created for Philadanco. This must have been at least my fourth viewing of it, and I never tire of its downshifting, menacing speed. Huggins also designed the costumes— crisp military navy blue with red-lined peplum skirts that flare as they spin, changing direction rapidly. Lyst, Evans, Bryant and Ruka White do marvelous solo turns, and I love that Huggins (in all the pieces) gives this kind of attention to individual dancers. Despite a few forgivable opening night misalignments, Philadanco could have put the nail in the coffin of any other Avenue of the Arts dance company Friday night.