Miriam Seidel
Writer, Artist and Critic
"Distilling African dance movements and highlighting their formal beauty"

GARTH FAGAN DANCE at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
For one night only, Garth Fagan Dance spread the achievements of two decades before a lucky audience at Bryn Mawr College. The Jamaican-born Fagan, who reached a wider audience with his choreography of "The Lion King" for Broadway, has shaped a dance language that flows with heart-stopping grace through his dancers.

Fagan's unique accomplishment is distilling African dance movements from their celebratory, ecstatic roots so as to highlight their formal beauty, on the one hand, and to reveal their molecular essence, if you will: the wave-motions that power the larger movements of dance. Friday's program of dances stretching back to 1978 showed the constancy and centrality of this aspect of his work.

"Prelude" (1981), a large-group piece featuring veteran soloist Norwood Pennewell, had a relaxed clarity, building from slow curves, ear-high leg lifts, and syrup-smooth spinal waves, to vision-blurring turns and wide-legged, open-chested stomps.

"Oatka Trail" (1979) refers to an Indian trail near Rochester, where Fagan teaches;/// the three men (headed by Steve Humphrey) limned deer-quick awareness of their surroundings, to the lush sounds of Dvorak.

This semi-subversive pairing of elements (Dvorak and Indian themes?!), shocking us into a different awareness of the material, is a strategy Fagan deployed well in the evening's centerpiece, "Nkanyit" (first performed at the Kennedy Center in 1997). In its first section, the languorous, elegant vocals of Betty Carter floated above primal, African-inflected dance sequences, with dancers outfitted to match in kente cloths and furs. Then, the tables turned, a neon-flashy hip-hop ensemble leaped and flipped to the recorded sounds of Kenyan percussions. These disjunctions of sound and movement idioms made each thing sound and look fresh, while gently pressing connections among them all. A third group, a timeless three-dancer "family", brought the other streams together for an integrative finale.

The evening's finale, "From Before" (1978), offered a jubilee of liquid movement and sound (steel drums and singers). In shimmering lycra unitards, the dancers flaunted those small swells of hip, pelvis or hand that flared out into bigger movement arcs. Their luminous bodies touched the sublime.

There are no additional performances.

--Miriam Seidel
Home | Biography | Visual Art Writing | Dance Writing | Fiction Writing | Links | Violet Fire | Contact