Dance: Delights of Diversity

A dance marathon staged by New York’s City Center? Was that doughty cultural impresario succumbing to the nostalgia craze reviving the 1920s stunts in which competing couples danced away the night—and the day, and sometimes the night again? Not quite. The City Center American Dance Marathon ’72, which ended last week at Manhattan’s ANTA Theater, was devoted more to the delights of diversity than to endurance. Over a period of six weeks, 20 of the most ruggedly individual dance companies in the U.S. matched style and idea in stalwart succession.

Most of the companies were already sufficiently established to be active throughout the U.S. at festivals, in smaller cities or on college campuses. By bringing them together in one big bash, and by risking the inevitable flops along with the successes, the City Center hoped to give the companies a kind of exposure and impact that otherwise would be beyond their reach. Alas, ticket sales were disappointing, and the City Center (which tried a similar venture on a smaller scale two years ago) has no immediate plans for another marathon. All the more reason to cheer the companies that most enlivened this one. Items:

> Inner City Repertory Dance Company, based in Los Angeles and led by a studious black named Donald McKayle, is a well-knit company of young black and white dancers. One of the best of them is Leslie Watanabe, who danced a leading role in McKayle’s new Sojourn as though the work were not about a few visits, but about all time. Set to a wryly dissonant musical trifle, Rapsodie á Sept by André Jolivet, Sojourn sent the dancers back and forth in changing patterns like travelers meeting briefly at a crossroads. Another Inner City star is Michele Simmons, who brought a simple dignity to her Caribbean mujer eternal in McKayle’s Songs of the Disinherited, then portrayed three faces of woman (sweetheart, wife, mother) in McKayle’s mournful ode to the chain-gang life, Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder. If McKayle’s choreographic style shows a knack for quick, deft blending of styles (such as modern, jazz, calypso, ballet), that is largely because he has spent much of the past decade tailoring dances to the tight demands of TV shows (Ed Sullivan, Bill Cosby).

> Lotte Goslar’s New York-based Pantomime Circus demonstrates a rare and precious conceit: dance can be funny as well as fashionable. One of the best of American mimes, Goslar is a dumpling of a woman with a turned-up nose and a turned-down figure that often resembles a lightly squeezed tube of toothpaste. Gnome is where her heart is, especially when spoofing flowers, inch-worms and swishy ballet masters, or imitating a katydid rubbing its legs (Splendor in the Grass). When four of her dancers somehow managed to portray a cowardly lion encountering an equally cowardly clown in a cage (Circus Scene), it became clear that she is not the only one who wears the pantaloni in her deliciously zany company.

> Rod Rodgers Dance Company is the creation of a comparatively recent but exciting recruit to professional dance, who in 1967 helped form the Association of Black Choreographers with the stated aim of discovering “the dancers’ identity of Rhythm the Ritual, Afro in which American.”the dance identity of the Afro American.” Rodgers’Rhythm Ritual, in which his dancers provided their own exotic accompaniment by beating sticks and bells, seemed like an ongoing experiment that has not yet found a final form. But in Harambee!, a drama about martyred black leaders, accompanied by five on stage drummers, his flair for sound and atmosphere brightened the stage of the ANTA with vivid scenes: the shooting of a black chief, a bust by the authorities, the re birth of rebellion in the up surge of anger that follows.

> José Limón Dance Company finds a major U.S. dancer and choreographer now watching from the wings (Limón is 64), but still managing to charge a young, vibrant ensemble with his familiar spirit, dignity and eloquence of movement. One new Limn work, The Unsung, a choreographically skillful paean to America’s vanquished Indian heroes, was imbued with all of the solemnity of an Indian sun dance and, unfortunately, much of its tedium. But Orfeo, a free, ever-unwinding retelling of the old legend set to Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11, summoned up the poetic suggestiveness and exquisite line that characterized his first big success, The Moor’s Pavane, which is still a favorite with the American Ballet Theater. Less striking but still provocative were Dances for Isadora, which drew on the Duncan story to fashion a subtle metaphor of death-in-life and life-in-death, and Carlata, a mad court fantasy (danced to silence) about the widow of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. Where is the permanent theater home that Limon deserves?

> Erick Hawkins Dance Company is the current forum for the abstract, avantgarde, and sometimes uneven work of a former husband and partner of Martha Graham. Hawkins regularly choreographs his works before his long-time collaborator, Composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, writes the music. This rather strange reversal of step and beat, not to mention cart and horse, too often showed in what might have been called the super-calisthenicization of his choreography. Yet Hawkins frequently attained a timeless mood in such Oriental-flavored works as Dawn Dazzled Door. The psuedo-Apollonian Angels of the Inmost Heaven featured a quartet of beauties who appeared topless to the accompaniment of a quintet of brass. Although Hawkins deployed the girls with such ritualistic restraint that the effect was almost asexual, the work succeeded in one kind of choreography that few other companies in the marathon have mastered: the concerted movement of large numbers of people past the box office and into the auditorium.