DANCE THEATER OF HARLEM
City Center, 55th Street between Sixth andSeventh avenues; (212) 581-1212. Seasonruns through Sunday.
FOR Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theater of Harlem, variety is the very spice of its choreographic space. Few companies display such easy-going and confident versatility.
Its latest program at the City Center – and hurry if you want to catch the company, time is fleeting for the season ends Sunday – deftly ran the changes on a shifting range of dance styles.
It opened with Dwight Rhoden’s emphatically modern (to the point of modish), “Twist.” With its electronic score by Antonio Carlos Scott, and chic unisex costumes by Miho Morinoe, Rhoden reveals his sure taste for flamboyant and unfettered invention, yet a far less sure sense of construction.
“Twist” was first given last year as part of the company’s 30th birthday celebrations. The rest of the program reached back into the company’s past, including the revival of Gabriella Taub-Darvash’s Soviet-style “Romeo and Juliet pas de deux,” first mounted on the troupe in 1976.
Bethania Gomes and an assured Duncan Cooper danced it with power and lyrical grace. Equally effective was the revival of Michael Smuin’s fiercely dramatic take on “Medea.”
Set to the music Samuel Barber first composed for Martha Graham’s version of the Medea story, “Cave of the Heart” ups the melodramatic ante by having Medea strangle her rival Creusa with her bare hands, assisted, no less, by her two stalwart, but nonetheless subsequently sacrificed, sons.
Lenore Pavlakos, rightly tearing shreds to tatters, danced with appropriate force, and Donald Williams also did well as her baffled, unfaithful but distraught husband, Jason.
The program ended with one of the Harlem company’s signature pieces, John Taras’ ever-popular version of Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” in which the designs by Geoffrey Holder cause the mythic bird to migrate to the colorful climes of the Haitian rainforest.
Kellye A. Saunders was the flashing yet delicate Firebird, and Cooper again shone as the stalwart prince, who catches her while hunting, but releases her, winning more than just her gratitude, but also his life and the hand of a beautiful princess.
Moral – always release birds with fiery tendencies. You never know what you’re going to get out of it.
