Ballroom Blitz
Koresh Dance Company does not hold back. Bare feet pounding the stage, this small troupe give themselves completely to artistic director Ronen Koresh's eclectic mix of dance styles (modern, jazz, Broadway, Middle Eastern, ballet). The company's Wilma program, which included a world premiere by modern dance great Donald Byrd, demonstrated the strengths and the weaknesses of this take-no-prisoners approach to movement.
Byrd, who is one of the most eloquent choreographers working, explained in the program notes that his inspiration for La Bal Noir was ballet's great reforming genius George Balanchine. What interested Byrd was a series of seemingly abstract Balanchine dances set in ballrooms, with people simply dancing together. But what Byrd saw in Balanchine were "undercurrents of something tragically wrong, bereavement, ill-fated relationships."
What Byrd apparently did not see was that Balanchine created these undercurrents, intended or not, using totally abstract movements. This is where Byrd's ambitious gloss on Balanchine went astray. Balanchine allowed the audience its own reaction to the dancing. Byrd wanted to be sure we got it — so his romance became more of a melodrama than emotion abstracted into movement. The Koresh ballroom dancers didn't simply yearn, they threw themselves on each other. One guy was so distraught his jacket had a red spot over his broken heart. Of speed, agility and physical bravery there was plenty, but of love, longing and poetry very little.
The program opened with Koresh's own Looking Back, a dance retrospective (with 15 individual sections) using music of the 1940s and '50s. Created last year for Dance Celebration, the collage featured music ranging from sultry Peggy Lee to exuberant Elvis. It was strenuously performed and beautifully lit (which was true of all the Koresh pieces). While the overall effect was exciting, a lot of great performances became simply a blur as one brief episode followed another.
Standing in Tears, a series of faux finales, brought the evening to a close with dancers moving in and out of Koresh's tribal circle in well-delineated patterns. Dancers waved goodbye, then kept dancing; at one point they stopped to check cell phone messages and question the audience. Here was Koresh at his best, creating movement with a sense of ritual while employing his ability to surprise, even taunt, his audience. Standing, like the whole program, was dominated by Melissa Rector's passionate performance, and suitably it was she who finally ended things, telling the audience: Go!
Koresh Dance Company
Wilma, Nov. 10, 8 p.m.
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