Philadanco’s Spring Dances

Philadanco has been on tour that included a sell-out run the Joyce Theater in New York, but they were back on their home turf in Philadelphia this month for their Spring season run in the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater last weekend for a four performances titled “Roots and Reflections” (Director’s Choice) comprised of repertory ballets by choreographers Talley Beatty, Ron K.  Brown, George Faison, and Harold Pierson, defining company dancemakers.

The company’s Founder/Artistic Advisor Joan Myers Brown and Artistic Director Kim Bears-Bailey switched up the hometown Spring run which usually showcases a premiere or two, instead this was a revival of repertory classics and a chance to see a new generation of Danco dancers in the main company and dancers from Danco II, the apprentice company. Bears-Bailey introduced the Sunday Matinee to a near-full house for the last of four performances. And by the response by this audience, these repertory works, as danced, proved as choreographically vibrant as they did in the day.

The concert opened with Ron K. Brown’s mystical ‘Gatekeepers’ created in 1977. Brown and Nigerian vocalist-composer Wunmi Olaiya creating a ‘heaven’ where soldiers are guiding the wounded to a safe haven.. The dancers- Leslie Bunkley, William E. Burden, Raven Joseph, Nathan McNatt Jr., Brena K. Thomas, and Kameren R. Whigham- performing Brown’s fusion of modernist and Africanist dance vocabulary with lyrical precision and stirring drama, Leslie Bunkley electrified mid-way through with a solo.

Next was choreographer George Faison’s ‘Suite Otis’ (1994), set to a song cycle by legendary R&B singer Otis Redding, who tragically died in a plane crash in 1967 at age 26. Faison’s laces in jazz dance idioms in his dramatizations of some of Redding’s biggest hits for a cast of five women and five men dancing out the complicated lovers’ themes aptly title tunes ‘Just One More Day’ and ‘I Can’t turn You Loose.’

Brena K. Thomas and Floyd McLean Jr are the cheek-to-cheeky partners who cut a smoldering rug to Otis’s  ‘Lover’s Prayer.’ For Redding’s blues-rock version of the Rolling Stones suggestive lament ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,’  Faison flips the scenario in gorgeously witty style with Janine Beckles, Mikaela Fenton, Grace Kimble Brandi Pinnix and Brena Thomas get to respond by dancing out their side of things. There is more canoodling between the sexes set to the hits ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ and ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ featuring the company’s thrilling high-flying jetes, duets and Danco’s luminous ensemble esprit.

The inimitable Joan Myers Brown wowed the crowd after intermission to introduce the second half of the program. Kudos to Kim Bears-Bailey and Tracy Vogt, both company alums, for the detailed, rigorous reconstruction of these works featuring casts of over 20 including six dancers from D2.

First was Harold Pierson’s  ‘Roots And Reflections’ opens with  dancers in silhouette against a blood red lighting, the scene titled The Middle Passage with the voice of a slave owner auctioneer selling the bodies of enslaved Africans.

It is a shattering and vital depiction of America’s genocide on the dance stage, when the dancers are fully lit, they are clustered together, 20 dancers drop to the floor their arms raised and swirling in a show of force and solidarity.

A solo dance follows as a reflection of community and survival moving forward. ‘Kumbaya’  African American creole origin sung among enslaved people and passed down through generations. Pierson creates a symbolic solo expressing struggle and inner peace danced with quiet intensity by Brittany Wright, sung with gorgeous serenity by vocalist Devin L. Roberts ,It is followed by the rousing communal dances of ‘Pattin Juba’ and ‘Ring Shout’ with the full cast of 23 dancers, the women in  floral skirts in a jubilant traditional expression of  praise and spiritual exaltation.

The concert closer was choreographer Talley Beatty’s rousing urban jazz ballet celebration ‘Pretty Is Skin Deep, Ugly to the Bone’ truly evoking the rhythm and blues vibes in the jazz dance variations of 70s, scored to music by Quincy Jones, funk by Earth, Wind and Fire and a centerpiece solo to set Natalie Cole smoldering version of ‘Good Morning Heartache.’ 

When the five men enter with a tall ladder with dancer Britany Wright laying on it, the audience burst into applause in recognition of this smoldering dramatization of ‘Good Morning Heartache.’  Wright ascends the ladder and performs a precarious adagio dance, each movement so precise that the audience kept bursting in applause at Wright’s Olympian precision and lyrical intensity. The final section set to a jazz-funk jam by Earth, Wind and Fire with the dancers in allegro movement that kept building in streams of rhythmic streams of jazz and 60s dance-funk stylings.