The ensemble work, often driving, is likewise strained now and again by over-stuffed phrases, which the dancers valiantly strive to execute: often they do so successfully, exceptional as they are, but sometimes corners have to be cut. Hahm, here with Corey Boatner, are largely magnificent in their virtuosic choreography, creating one indelible image after another, but occasionally Lemonius’s choreography slips away from organically-constructed phrases and relies on ambitiously acrobatic partnering that seems showy, unsuited to this ostensibly-thoughtful dance. This piece too has a central pas de deux that highlights, through the duet’s alternating sharing of weight, the power of emotional support. Garfield Lemonius’s 2017 “Catharsis” is an abstract study in the less-fraught, but still-real, kind of day-to-day concerns we humans seem unable to shake. While the performers, after all, are meant to indicate the exhaustion of constantly being on the run, their physical prowess as trained dancers, combined with their artistic integrity, underscores McKayle’s thesis here: the way that humanity, even amidst struggle and horror, is in the end a beautiful resistance to the ugliness of war. The ensemble’s precision throughout the dance, meanwhile - including later in the lengthy running, chugging, leaping sections - is striking, and essential to maintaining the framework of performance. Yoojung Hahm and Tyveze Littlejohn are searing in their compelling, long duet that begins ritualistically, the two lunging side by side or, mirrored, etching legs out in staccato developpés. Kenneth Keith’s evocative lighting design (adapted by Trey "Trezie" Grimes) bathes the stage in dusky shadows or captures, starkly, a long diagonal of travelers picking their way across the stage with a mesmerizingly hushed, repetitive sequence, thrusting one leg forward, their hips following a moment later, describing half-circles, over and over. Like McKayle’s dance, Anoushka Shankar’s sitar- and percussion-fueled score was inspired by the traumatic experiences of war-driven refugees. The 2017 “Crossing the Rubicon: Passing the Point of No Return” was the last piece the great McKayle made, and the company honors his legacy - and the dance’s somber subject - by dancing it with unwavering focus. The opening night trio, Chloé-Grant Abel, Samiyah Lynnice, and Topaz von Wood, were extraordinary, fierce and rigorous, determined.
Solos are filled with percussive contractions and breath-suspending hovers on one leg, the other leg piercing the atmosphere above the dancer’s head, their torso leaning precipitously sideways, or arching deeply back etched. The main event, however, is the choreography for the three women-in-mourning who alternately traverse the stage, supporting one another, their arms clasped on others’ backs, or linked by outstretched hands, or sit on chairs, their feet restlessly skittering. Briefly, a Preacher, performed by Davry Ratcliffe, makes his way about the stage, in lunging steps, reaching his arms out, as if beseeching, then contracting into a shell, hands pulled back into his center, as if in private prayer. Nikki Giovanni’s spare poem “The Women Gather” is spoken in voiceover before Eric Gale’s powerful, bluesy/funky rendition of the dance’s titular African American spiritual rumbles in, its sway and strut infectious. and her brother the latter- like King, a preacher- died in his sleep at 19. Robinson’s “Mary Don’t You Weep” is an excerpt from her “Spiritual Suite,” which was inspired by the lives and deaths of Dr.
Four women join, waving small feathery fans, and the romp is on: Male/female couples quickly form, performing easy-breezy steps with a mix of innocent glee and frank sensuality. Four sharply-dressed men enter, jubilantly, carrying chairs held high and giant smiles. Dunham’s “Ragtime”- the brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it excerpt from the 1972 production of Scott Joplin’s not-a-ragtime-opera opera “Treemonisha”- opens the program with an adorably old-school bang.
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