by Leigh Witchel
In its 50 years, Dance Theatre of Harlem has never had trouble with branding. Being the first African-American ballet company only scratches the surface: the company has a loyal audience, knows what that audience likes and knows how to deliver. With a commission, a homegrown work, a revival and a company classic, DTH put on display a cross-section of the company’s brand.
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa does two sorts of work as a guest artist: dance-theater pieces and straight-up dances. Her dance theater is more liberated; her straight dance commissions looked hemmed-in, and “Balamouk,” a treats the Gypsy/Klezmer/Arabic music of the French band Les Yeux Noirs as being from some imaginary but exotic composite land where everyone wears loose clothing and shimmies.
To a loud thumping bass, the cast moved across the stage in a tight group with dancers breaking from it like popcorn. A woman was hauled by the men as she pointed the route ahead; the next section was a man accompanied by three women before dancing a duet with one of them. Everyone grooved on their own to end, leaving one woman bourréeing in front of a lamp throwing shadows.
“Balamouk’ is harmless if uninspired, and with its driving beat and constant movement, it’s an audience pleaser. The It’s-A-Small-World exoticism and the sleek vocabulary looked very Joffrey Ballet, 1978. But if, say, New York City Ballet programmed this in 2019, there would be snarky comments about it being culturally tone-deaf. Then again, maybe we should stop snarking at cultural tourism as if it were cultural appropriation.
“Dougla” is the flip side of that coin; a work that turns Afro-Caribbean heritage into pop theater. Geoffrey Holder’s smash closer from 1974 occupies a similar place in DTH’s repertory that “Revelations” does at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. With its pageantry, nonstop drumming and troops of men wearing the barest briefs, it’s anything but subtle. By the end your innards may have vibrated to a pulp. But the juggernaut is the point. Close to the end, the men faced us, shouting and gesticulating, and you could even see a resemblance to the Māori haka. If the dancers push and never let up, the Broadway pageantry of “Dougla” turns into power, and it becomes a poem of force and pride.
The company’s tireless founder, Arthur Mitchell, was not forgotten. A deft tribute film, choreographed by the company’s resident choreographer, Robert Garland, and directed by Daniel Schloss, wove together photos and recorded oral history with danced mockumentary. This was followed by a restaging of Mitchell’s “Tones,” “tweaked” and renamed “Tones II” as Artistic Director Virginia Johnson explained in her curtain speech. First done in 1971, restaging and revisions were begun by Mr. Mitchell last year before his death.
The ballet is a neat house product of a Balanchine black-and-white work, only this time in silver tights. With serial music by Tania León (the first musical director of the company, who also collaborated on “Dougla”). Five couples do neat cellular partnering that is so House o’ Modern Balanchine it was close to parody: pick the woman up, turn her upside down, lay her over your shoulder, set her down in arabesque. So were the steps for the women: echappé on pointe to a wide second, deep plié squat, turn in, turn out, and pirouette.
The work was demanding, and on this crop, not flattering. Dancers who looked good in other ballets looked exposed here. A character saut de basque in unison had the men stumbling. But if it had the technical difficulty plus the Balanchine trappings, what was missing from “Tones II” in 2019 was a viewpoint.
A clue about what that might have been lay in Garland’s “Nyman String Quartet No. 2.” Since its reboot in 2012, DTH has been working to get its level back up to where it was, and Garland has been doing much of the heavy lifting. “Nyman” was a ballet no company but DTH could do properly because it’s about the company.
Using a similar casting structure as “Tones II” (Tones is 7 men, 5 women, “Nyman” is 5 and 5) Garland had the men begin in the opening position for the men in “Agon.” But when they turned, instead of academic steps they moved into a loose groove, and danced in a circle with their arms overhead, swaying. This set up everything for the rest of the ballet.
Garland possibly knows the company better than anyone else, and you could see it in what he gave them to do – strict neoclassical steps as well as looser discotheque moves. He made the men stop near the finale, rise up and do a double turn in the air. It’s a step of baseline virtuosity in ballet, but one as much tied to confidence as technique. You could picture him in the front of the room during rehearsals, egging them on. He structured the women’s dance right after similarly: relaxed dancing moved into short breakaway solos requiring more classical rigor. Garland is a clean neoclassical choreographer, and stylist who learned from the Balanchine repertory. His phrases have the natural flow of someone who uses them daily.
A solo for Da’Von Doane showed him as the dancer of the night. In “Dougla” Doane played the groom with such charisma it almost seemed he was set on marrying the entire audience. In “Nyman,” the segment once again began with free movement: walking, jogging that escalated to jumps and clean pirouettes and neat petit allegro. Doane threaded it all together seamlessly – making the point that it all can go together if you’re enough of a dancer. Along with Doane, the ballet showed off other men – Dylan Santos’ cleanliness and Christopher Charles McDaniel’s brio.
Garland was looking at many of the same issues of integrating classical and vernacular movement as Kyle Abraham and William Forsythe, but he was coming at it from another angle musically. He chose a cool, minimalist score instead of pop and followed it deferentially. His vocabulary mirrored this; he was looking for a combination, but one that favored neoclassicism. Abraham and Forsythe had an easier time setting classical movement to pop music than Garland did setting pop movement to classical music. Choosing Nyman said a lot about Garland. He treated the Nyman like a road map: when the music changed, the women walked in and began a different section. When the music stopped, the action stopped.
It set an extra challenge and tension between following the rules and breaking them that Garland didn’t resolve. Yet at the last movement, Garland broke his own congruence: the music abruptly stopped, but the dancers kept going, heading backwards and only stopping when they had pointed to the sky. There was room to rebel. But with Garland, the real question to ask is: as DTH navigates the slings and arrows of another half-century of outrageous fortune, how much better will the dancers look in another year?
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“Nyman String Quartet No. 2,” “Balamouk,” “Tones II,” “Dougla” – Dance Theatre of Harlem
New York City Center, New York, NY
April 13, 2019
Cover: “Nyman String Quartet No. 2.” Photo © Kent Becker.
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