Since it was founded in 1968, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company has often been compared with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, founded 10 years before. And with Philadanco and Dallas Black Dance Theater, which started up soon after. These troupes share a focus on the African American experience but also, perhaps less obviously, a model. They are repertory companies, which means they are forever facing the question: What repertory will best serve their dancers and audiences?
How about a beloved masterpiece? That’s what Dayton Contemporary Dance has brought to New York for its run at the Joyce Theater this week: Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade” (1975). It serves as a terrific closer for a three-work program that begins at the other end of the quality spectrum.
Dayton is the first Black-centered company to perform “Esplanade.” As an addition to the repertory, the work has some symbolic weight as a show of range and an implicit defiance of limited notions about what such a company should do. In performance, though, what seemed to matter more was that Dayton wasn’t the Paul Taylor company.
“Esplanade,” inspired by the image of a woman running for a bus, is set to excerpts from Bach violin concertos but is built from simple materials: walking, running. Generation after generation of Taylor dancers have made this look easy. The Dayton dancers reveal how difficult it is.
You can see the mental and physical effort required for the quick shuffling of formations, the courage needed to baseball-slide across the stage without a collision or to leap into someone’s arms. Not yet relaxed into the work, the Dayton dancers slightly rush some of the slower parts, denying the basic moves their full musical values, and they don’t quite let go into the headlong sections.
But their careful attention is touching, and here and there, they find their own take on the classic. During the piece’s most tender moment, when a man lies on his back and a woman walks on him as if scaling a mountain, resting her full weight on his stomach, Dayton’s Sadale Warner ennobles the gesture with elegance.
The program’s middle work, “Jacob’s Ladder,” isn’t a new acquisition. The hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris made it for the company in 2006, as part of a collection of dances inspired by the painter Jacob Lawrence. It’s not clear what it has to do with Lawrence, but it is clearly the work of a great choreographer.
At first we’re in some kind of bardo realm, with lunging dancers creeping onstage as more back in from the opposite wings. Soon, the music — Zap Mama and other sounds deftly mixed by Darrin Ross — acquires a beat and we enter a paradise of club dancing, alive with shimmying, swiveling, wobbly knees and brilliant footwork. While keeping in the groove, Harris’s sophisticated composition continually layers its materials, setting slow against quick, foreground against background. At the end, the silent screams become sighs of release.
Here, too, the Dayton dancers aren’t entirely at home, a little too stiff to give the work its full idiomatic juice. But as in “Esplanade,” they find their way in flashes, as when Aaron J. Frisby, leaping in a steep arc, hangs in the air.
It’s unfortunate that all this is preceded by Ray Mercer’s “This I Know for Sure” (2017). At one point, we see a dancer under a symbolic lightbulb, swatting at it during an agony-of-creation solo. But this, and the dance around it, is sorely lacking in creativity, saddled with vapid music by Olafur Arnalds and Ludovico Einaudi and others, mired in battle-of-the-sexes clichés and merely feinting at sass.
In Mercer’s work, there is plenty of action but none of the Harris drive. The dancers leap into one another’s arms and step on each other’s bodies, but without the excitement and emotion of “Esplanade.” By the end of the program, there is one thing you know for sure: Dayton can make much better repertory choices than its opener.
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