THE MAGIC OF KATHERINE DUNHAM
An evening spent with Katherine Dunham–whose works the Alvin Ailey troupe revived this season–is vibrant, boisterously theatrical, and subtly disturbing. We can’t see with the fresh eyes of 40 or 50 years ago (these dances were first choreographed as early as 1937, as late as 1950), but we can imagine how new these dances must have looked then, what an infusion they were to an emerging American dance scene.
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The first act, an Afro-Caribbean suite of seven dances, progressed from Western emphasis on control–it began with a dance titled Adagioto Shango, an Afro-Caribbean exploration of the loss of control. To the classical strains of Albinoni, Adagio opened with five symmetrically arranged dancers at three barres–Leonard Meek, in blinding white tights, was featured at the center barre. The barres and the precise, controlled way in which the dancers performed their “exercises” all recalled the discipline ballet requires–but the moves themselves couldn’t be more different. A deft foot, extended and pointed at the audience, was quickly flexed, like a hand waving hi! The torso instead of being perpendicular to the barre paralleled it, the dancer curving backward from the waist in an arrested back flip. A leg was extended, not with the torso upright but reaching forward for the ground, chin pointing earthward, the impulse not for a right angle but a diagonal line.
Los Indios (1941) violated our elitist sense of who dances and why. In this attractive, humorous piece, two itinerant Indian women, at first bent double under their burdens, responded to a boyish flute player by dancing. It wasn’t a display by the young, beautiful, and carefree for an audience but a release, a means of joyful expression for people whose lives are heavy. But although these two were called from drudgery to dance, significantly the final image was of one woman apparently descending into the earth under her burden of a chair and ratty suitcase. Dance may not be as liberating as a sentimental view implies.
The third act, a suite of Dunham’s American dances, was lively and attractive but rather empty. Based mostly on American folk dance–square dances, nightclub dancing, the cakewalk, among others–these dances seemed repressed and staid after the first two acts. I guess we pay a price for control; and yet there are pleasures in distance and restraint. Barrelhouse–a clear audience favorite the night I was there–featured Renee Robinson and Andre Tyson as two young, urban blacks on the make. Their mating dance had a humorous edge, an assumed cover of nonchalance and sophistication over a real hunger. In the dance’s coda, a gum-cracking Robinson, avid and bored, rolled her eyes at Tyson, inviting him to a second chance; when he walked, off, she shrugged her shoulders and, with one disappointed glance, walked off too.
