Garth Fagan Dance performed in its Chestnut Street studio on
Friday night as part of the Rochester Fringe Festival, showcasing Fagan’s
latest work and premiering Norwood Pennewell’s fifth
piece for the company. Watching the Rochester-based, internationally-acclaimed
company dance in the same place its members rehearse, create, and sweat
intensifies and personalizes the performance. It’s also exciting to see the new
pieces while they are still works-in-progress, before they are practiced and
polished for the company’s home season.
The big surprise of the night was seeing powerhouse Guy
Thorne back onstage while VitolioJeune,
the showman with the impossibly high jumps, was missing. According to Fagan, Jeune is no longer with the company and Thorne has returned
after a few years away forming his own company, Futurpointe.
The evening began with Fagan’s always-inspiring “Prelude —
Discipline is Freedom.” This piece shows the dancers in exquisite warm-up
sequences, from simple stretching all the way to great leaps, giving us a crash
course on the Fagan Technique or the way he asks his dancers to move. Since
there are no wings to the studio space stage, the audience is able to see the
dancers sidle in along the walls and behind the stage lighting to make their
entrances. Note that Fagan’s dancers need little or no preparation — no running
start, for example — for the grand jetes and other
flying leaps they execute with seeming ease.
Next on the program was Pennewell’s
new piece “So You See.”
“I’m just thrilled at the choreographer he’s become while
he’s still boogying,” Fagan said of Pennewell in the
introduction of the piece.
While it resembles Pennewell’s
other works, this new one a pleasure to watch: the parts flow easily into one
another and are imbued with a lightness, a sense of joy even — especially the
third part which is a solo for Sade Bully, a dancer who fully inhabits every
inch of her lithe body with acute physical and emotional awareness. Birdlike in
elegance, Bully handles the slow, sensual choreography with balletic precision.
At one point she reclines backwards, lowering herself seemingly vertebrae by
vertebrae, a feat only accomplished with amazing core strength. Occasionally,
the choreography in this section seemed forced, like when Bully pronouncedly
stamped her foot on the floor while in a held pose. But it is still a work in
progress with fine-tuning to be done.
Another excerpt of “So You See” featured a group of dancers,
well, dancing. It appears that they are out on the town, living it up — something
that Pennewell has done in other pieces — sort of a “dance
within a dance” if you will. The dancers were loose-limbed with plenty of hip, moving
to well-chosen music by Marc Cary and Vijay Iyer. The
section began with grounded, earthy movements and segued into faster and more
angular jumps and movements. Again, it works.
Fagan’s new piece, “Dance For/With Geoffrey,” was first
performed at Lincoln Center Out of Doors this summer
as part of a program that was a tribute to the late Geoffrey Holder, a
prodigious dancer, choreographer, painter, designer and actor. Like Fagan,
Holder was of Caribbean roots. The work pays homage to Holder’s 59-year
relationship with dancer Carmen de Lavallade and Holder’s courageous spirit
even as he lay dying.
The work opened with, again, a dance within a dance as the
company portrays a group of women and another of men dancing and interacting in
a carnivale setting. The women swarm onstage in red
blouses and black skirts, all feisty with hip thrusts and come hither smiles.
Then the men swagger in, shimmying their shoulders and thrusting their
pelvises. Before long the dancers are coupling up, the men lifting the women
into the air while the women use their legs seductively. It seemed to be a
reference back to the youth and burgeoning creative forces of Holder and de
Lavallade. It is a delight to experience.
The next part, a duet between Pennewell
and Adriene Barber who represent Holder and de
Lavallade, was less convincing. Pennewell edges
tentatively onstage and carefully slides sideways across. Then there were a lot
of arm movements: he was trying to tell us something.
When Pennewell was joined by
Barber, things got more interesting. Holder and deLavallade’s
great love and their artistry together become clear through the intense
embraces, the synchronicity of their movements, and the sense they impart of
defying death. At this point, Fagan’s voice read words of memorial penned by
Holder’s son Leo. The sentiments expressed, of the longevity of love and
creative work, gave added weight to the love of the represented couple fiercely
holding each other onstage before us.
Garth Fagan Dance will perform again on Saturday, September 19; Thursday, September 24; and Friday, September 25; at Garth Fagan Dance Studio. 7 p.m. $18. Appropriate for all ages.
This article appears in Sep 16-22, 2015.
