DANCE REVIEW : Novelty by ‘Black Choreographers’ at Wadsworth

Icons of refinement began each half of the Saturday program in the “Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century” festival at the Wadsworth Theatre.

First came San Francisco Ballet principal Christopher Boatwright, dancing Alonzo King’s “Prayer” (music by Al Koran Alkarin) with his customary nobility and a superb mastery of all the solo’s surprising inversions and enhancements of classical style.

Later on, L. Martina Young appeared in “Oath: State of Recurrent Intimacies” (an unaccompanied solo excerpt from her “America Flats”), shaping every mobile balance-in-extension, every statement of technical prowess into a triumphant victory over gravity, time and fear.

Boatwright made his virtuosity look natural and easy, Young forced you to consider dancing, moment-by-moment, as a metaphysical miracle. Both helped the festival deconstruct limited notions of black choreography in a program dominated by pure-dance issues.

Each featuring nine dancers, King’s “Untitled” (for the Bay Area-based Lines Dance Company) and Donald Byrd’s “Rend” (for The Group, from New York City) sought to update ballet rhetoric and technique--King from the inside, Byrd from the outside.

As in his solo for Boatwright, King experimented with torso fluidity, with conventional classical steps executed from unconventional positions, with movement patterns in which control suddenly yielded to raw impulse.

Strongly danced (especially by Marina Hotchkiss), this was highly arbitrary and self-conscious choreography--but spectacularly promising too.

A neo-Armitage essay in Fascist control, “Rend” framed manic solos by Tricia Toliver with semaphoric group assaults--all very difficult and nasty, but as much a commentary as a showpiece. Byrd has always tested his audience as much as himself and some of his best works have been double-edged.

Lula Washington’s “Initiations” (for L.A. Contemporary Dance Theatre) began like the cell scene in “Petrushka” (a dancer flung through a doorway), developed into a “No Exit”-style triangle and used a lot of obvious mime plus a little flamboyant dancing to suggest the way deprivation fuels rage, and the price that society exacts for acceptance. Washington has a genuine talent for characterization and movement expression; none of it was evident here.

Intense, inventive scores by Donald Fontowitz, Mio Morales and Robert Dale enhanced the King, Byrd and Washington pieces.