92Y Presents Limón Dance Review — Old Feels New; New Feels Classic

They move as a piece.

They remind of a recently fed and sated baby carried in a sling, happily mother-snuggling while they dream.  They remind also of a boat having its own mind and direction as you try to pull it to shore, or when it gently rocks to water ripples too subtle to see.

We’re cued by the title of choreographer Aszure Barton’s new work JOIN, to see and feel connection. Because JOIN is a salute to Doris Humphrey’s lost masterpiece and Humphrey's early explorations of gravity in modern dance, you too might be transfixed by Barton’s gushes into anti-gravity.  We see it in manic jump holds of fellow dancer’s torsos like mid-air squats, as if they are a dog in heat.  We see it in the seamless one-armed lift by dancers to let smaller dancers fly, or when one dancer emerges on high from the close-knit ensemble circle to touch imagined clouds.  But whether it is a solo dancer running circles round the circle, or in a long arm and stride breakaway, or resting in sleep while the ensemble circles above them, we quickly come to anticipate their return to the peace of a piece.

Barton explains in the program notes, “…our power as a collective is in our ability to connect, and that coming-together is joy (never without a challenge)!”

Like this reviewer,  expect to quickly recognize Barton’s JOIN as that paradoxical term— instant classic.

92Y’s Finale for it’s 90th Year Celebrating Dance

Barton’s work was the finale of the Limón Company’s closing performance for 92Y’s 90th year celebrating dance.  The evening began with Limón’s Artistic Director, Dante Puleio, saying “Once Upon a Time…”, and then continuing to frame the evening’s program as a story of modern dance itself.  Puleio conjured a vivid picture in our imagination of tall, strikingly handsome José Limón connecting with that most impressive pioneer of modern dance technique, Doris Humphrey.

Three short pieces from the Limón Company’s earliest repertoire told Puleio’s story of modern dance where his words left off.

As if colorizing a black and while oldie film, dazzling dancer Jessica Sgambelluri performed Humphrey’s 1931 6 minute work, Two Ecstatic Themes. 

Freedom vs. control...

To fall and then to recover from a fall...

Puleio explained the work as a metaphor for life.  In a white gown that let her legs be hidden stands for her torso, Sgambelluri’s arms, head and hands emoted. She seemed to hold an imagined oversized beachball.  She moved in sync to piano notes, sometimes pulsing to the score’s staccato.  She reached back and gave in to gravity.  The choreography was refreshingly dated—

so old and unexpected that it feels new. 

La Malinche, Puleio explained, was a story that five year-old Limón would see re-enacted in his village.  In Limón’s choreographic telling, the dancers seem like two-dimensional paper dolls, often making triangles with their bent limbs, or aligning in the same frozen angle. 

There is drama.

There is geometry in motion.

Limón’s re-telling of Othello — The Moor’s Pavane—struck this reviewer as the Limón Company’s best choreographic taunt of the evening that shouted— “And just why did you want to discard those vinyl records?”  Set to Purcell music, the four dancers are corseted to the stylistic court dances of yore, but within that super-tight girdle layout the emotive landscape of love, jealousy, devotion, and betrayal in the Bard’s tale in just 19 minutes of dance. 

You too might see this dance and think you will never see Shakespeare’s Othello the same way again.