DANCE REVIEW : Live-Wire Choreography Sends Uneven Signals : Dayton Contemporary Dance Company’s hard-edged, flashy style doesn’t quite camouflage performers’ lack of experience.
IRVINE — The Dayton Contemporary Dance Company has the virtue of looking like youthful everyday people. The company also has the liability of dancing like youthful everyday people.
In a program of mostly familiar works by Talley Beatty, Donald McKayle, George Faison and Kevin Ward on Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, the 16 dancers looked conscientious, devoted and well-drilled, but also lacking in ease, security, carry-through and interpretive skills.
As a whole, the company looked best in Beatty’s “The Stack Up,†which drew the usual cheers from audience members even when they were watching a human being self-destruct through drug addiction.
Beatty’s hard-edged, flashy, keep-it-in-motion choreography allowed the least visible discontinuities in momentum. Labored starts and stops were camouflaged in the general blur of activity. The widely varying levels of accomplishment looked less obvious.
Still, several dancers stood out, including G.D. Harris, Terence Greene, Dawn Wood, Brian Keith and Sheri Williams, probably the company’s most spectacular dancer.
Williams took the title role in Faison’s “Gazelle,†which owes an enormous debt to the traditional Yaqui Indian Deer Dance.
Dancing with bounding lightness and sculpted, multifaceted clarity, Williams attempted to elude a group of hunters stalking the animal. Meanwhile, four women prepare for a meal and a shamanistic Old Man oversees the events. Once the gazelle is slain, events take a radical turn, as one woman appears to be shot and a man struggles against enslavement. The piece apparently is only part of a full-evening work.
Williams again brought sunny happiness, clarity of line and sinuous weightlessness to McKayle’s classic “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder,†which allowed the seven suffering Men on the Chain Gang to emote powerfully. Cecil Slaughter and C. Norris Young offered forceful solos.
Choreography new to the area was Ward’s “Love and the Weather,†a somewhat confused tribute to Motown.
Resident choreographer of the company, Ward seems to be trying to do various things at once here. In addition to playing with signature Motown motifs--the stylized poses of background singers, the emerging prominence of various soloists, including a supreme trio of women--he takes time to suggest some insecurities of male adolescence.
Men self-consciously adjust their T-shirts and jeans, stroke their cheeks and generally check out how they’re groomed. One guy even pops a pimple.
The dance begins with people falling into lock-step behavior and one man is ostracized for violating the prevailing social codes. But only for a moment. Later on, the choreographer explores some antagonistic male-female relationships.
None of these ideas are carried very far, however. The focus tends to roll over into easy-going group activity that only indifferently responds to such hits as “My Girl,†“Heatwave†or “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.â€
The Dayton company appeared as part of the Irvine Barclay “Feet First Contemporary Dance Series,†which concludes May 7 with the Joe Goode Performance Group.
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