A man lies on his belly in the shape of a cross. Another man, naked, hangs over him, dangling nearly cruciform from a horizontal pole. The naked man descends, walks to the other’s head and slowly squats. The prone man rises, revealing that he has a horse’s tail. The two men merge into the form of a centaur.
This is the arresting opening of “Jamelgos,” a work by the Mexican choreographer Diego Vega Solorza that had its world premiere at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday as part of Limón Dance Company’s early start on its 80th anniversary season. (The company was founded in 1946.)
The opening is arresting especially for its potential connections to the work of José Limón, whose dances had an ambivalent attitude toward Catholic iconography and often focused on a power struggle between two men. That Vega Solorza, well known in his country but not here, is from the same region of Mexico as the Americanized Limón is the kind of resonance that a legacy company looks for when trying to freshen its repertory.
The rest of “Jamelgos,” alas, is a disappointment. Out of fog more dancers emerge, with white ponytails on their heads and rears. (“Jamelgos” is slang for emaciated horses.) They wear hooded leather jerkins that expose their midriffs and upper thighs. In a series of fade-in-fade-out scenes, they swish their tails in bands of light and strike martial poses in fast and slow motion.
Last year, Vega Solorza sold props and costumes from his works at Art Basel Miami Beach, and those for “Jamelgos” (by Julio César Delgado) have a fetishistic allure. It’s the choreography that’s lacking. You might think there’s nothing worse than boring, joyless depictions of group sex, but then strobe lights start flashing.
In a program note, Vega Solorza presents all this as a rebellion against fixed ideas of masculine strength. But a rebellion in dance requires more kinetic imagination. That goes for revivals, too. On this program, “Jamelgos” is paired with a new production of Limón’s “The Emperor Jones” (1956) that seeks to downplay race and dial up homoerotic subtext. Such re-examinations of the company’s classics are permissible, even necessary, yet this one doesn’t come to life.
“The Emperor Jones” is based on Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play about a Pullman porter who convinces the people of a Caribbean island to make him emperor. This revival changes the setting to an urban one, outfits its protagonist with a fedora and exchanges his throne for an outsized leather armchair. The intended effect, I think, is to evoke film versions of “Scarface,” but the giant chair makes Jones (Johnson Guo) look more like a boy playing dress up.
Jones is a pretender, yes, but he nevertheless needs believable prowess and physical charisma. In the film of Limón in the role, the choreographer conveys a prideful pleasure in motion that Guo’s performance misses, the shading that creates character.
I was concerned that an amplification of subtext would make Limón’s work, not the most subtle to begin with, unbearably broad. And this production does overemphasize the gun hanging between Jones’s legs to a cartoonish degree. But I would have welcomed more homoerotic tension between Guo and Joey Columbus as the manipulating Man in White (originally the White Man). Any kind of tension would have helped. For all its updating, the production feels dutiful, not fully inhabited.
Dante Puleio, the Limón company’s artistic director, is clearly trying to shake up the troupe’s fusty image. More power to him. Relevance matters to the survival of institutions like this. Fully imagined and embodied dancing matters more, though.
Limón Dance Company
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.
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