PHILADANCO! presents Our Voices, Our Choices…This is Us!

World-premiere Endings

Commissioned pieces can be a gamble, especially with a choreographer who is creating on a full company for the first time, but when it works, you can catch lightning in a bottle. PHILADANCO! caught the lightning with Martha Nichols’s An Acceptance of Necessary Endings. The piece followed the course of endings in the abstract, from loss to acceptance. Nichols seamlessly blended contemporary dance with a mix of styles that brought the African roots of hip hop to the fore. The men, in particular, shone in the first part: side-on to the audience and in a close formation line dance, they gave us all the swagger, with deep knees and shoulders that hit the beat of Laura Mvula’s jazzy music.

Part two of Acceptance slowed the tempo. The women put a hand over their broken hearts or covered their faces, their arms held close to the body while their shoulders rocked their anguish. In the finale, the dancers moved on to Mvula’s “Let Me Fall”, meeting the challenge with the swish of a hip, the turn on the heel of an upturned foot. Costume designer Anna-Alisa Belous’s diaphanous Grecian tunics over loose pants filled the stage with color while emphasizing the grace of the dancers.

Layered bodies

Bebe Miller, choreographer of 2001’s My Science, has talked about embracing the awkwardness of the human body, and that slightly off-kilter movement informs the dance (here re-visioned by Tracy Vogt). Miller filled the stage with pairs in lift after lift, the dancers in black and white by designer Natasha Gurueva. Andrew Bryant swung Brandi Pinnix from side to side like ringing a bell, and the lift repeated on other pairs while Addison Hill and Ankhtra Battle faced each other, their necks curving like swans in love. A trio of women danced in a circle, then later the men did their variation on the other side of the stage. I was amazed by the structure of this dance, which gave us so many layers of movement with just nine dancers.

A Movement for Five

Choreographer Dawn Marie Bazemore created A Movement for Five in 2015. In a company video, she said that she remembered when the Central Park Five were in the news. Later, the Ken Burns documentary of that name inspired her to do the piece. It begins in the days before the arrest, with Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” in the background, but the anguished heart of the piece is Act 2. DANCO has some of the best male dancers in the business, delivering the emotion as well as the technique, and they broke our hearts here. The five men; Floyd McLean, Jr. in the lead with Andrew Bryant, William E. Burden, Nathan McNatt, Jr., and Israel Hilton; gathered at center stage, shaking, bent over their hands to cover their faces, or reaching to heaven, as if they could not believe what was happening. Bathed in separate spotlights that isolated them each in the dark, they lay on the floor, their backs to the audience, their hands crossed behind them as if handcuffed. It was chilling. The music, Sigur Rós’s Ekki Mukk, seemed to hold us in its sorrowful embrace. At the end, the five return to the community. In comments after the show, Bazemore talked about her own sorrow that the piece remains as relevant as when she created it.

Bringing back By Way of the Funk

The struggle is still with us, but DANCO always sends the audience home dancing, and choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s By Way of the Funk is another raucous good time. Dancers in black with deep fringe brought the social dances of the past alive, with Andrew Bryant in a quick moonwalk in the background. Guest artist Lamar Baylor, in a shining white jumpsuit, reprised his role from the original 2009 performance, leading the company and the audience, with Leslie Bunkley and Brena Thomas, dripping fringe in white with big, joyfully fake white afros like they just stepped out of the Parliament-Funkadelic mothership. Belous again hit the mark with the costumes, and there were probably few of us oldsters who didn’t leave determined to try at home some of those steps we remembered from our own days.

During the intermission, founder and artistic consultant Joan Myers Brown (looking fabulous in glittering silver and stiletto heels) presented the company’s first Joanie award to director and producer Lee Daniels. He’d missed the presentation last year, stuck in LA with Covid. Daniels represents the DANCO legacy in the community: as a boy, he took lessons at the school, and he credits Brown with his success today.