A Triumphant Collaboration : DANCE REVIEW : Fagan’s Choreography in Stunning ‘Griot’ Sustains Vision, Commitment to Traditions

Dwarfed by the giant, endless slave-chain behind him, Norwood Pennewell inches across the stage of Royce Hall on his back--pulling himself ever forward toward a destination that he can’t possibly see.

This is one of the tales told by “Griot New York,” a stunning full-evening collaboration by choreographer Garth Fagan, composer Wynton Marsalis and sculptor Martin Puryear that had its Southern California premiere at UCLA on Wednesday and ends a two-performance engagement at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts tonight.

In West African tribal cultures, a griot is an oral historian and poet who interprets events in terms of their deepest, most enduring values. True to its title, “Griot New York” uses modern dance, acoustic jazz and oversized, familiar objects to show contemporary African-American experience from a mythic perspective.

Through brilliant shifts in style and a welter of references, the eight-part work sustains both an original vision and a commitment to several intersecting traditions. With only a few brief and intimate exceptions, all of Fagan’s dances here exploit the concept of radical juxtaposition, one of Africa’s greatest influences on modernism.

At one moment, the choreography will focus on linear limb extensions; in the next, it’ll be torso undulations or rolling on the floor. Looseness and tension alternate, as do big jumps and tiny muscular isolations. Solo and duet passages yield to group statements. Fast music may inspire slow motion. Dancers lost in thought stroll alongside those engulfed by action, and cool architectural formality frames the warmest personal interplay.

Obviously, these contrasts parallel those of modern city life and Fagan makes them more extreme through the element of surprise. For instance, you’ll never see any preparation for those sidelong split jumps in which the feet make a sudden, extra rise in the air just when you think they’re about to descend. Where does any Fagan dancer set a balance, brace for a lift, take a deep breath? Maybe offstage, maybe in class. Never in public.

The company’s ability to integrate effortlessly all the switches in vocabulary and impetus heaped on them not only makes a thematic statement about African-American resilience but also forms one of the unifying principles of “Griot New York.” Asymmetry represents another, with some of the angular reaching motifs from the fluid and joyous early sections recurring as statements of despair in a stark episode titled “The Disenfranchised.”

With its references to people with AIDS, the mentally ill and others adrift in our cities, this restless social panorama features another bitter Puryear sculpture: an impossibly narrow white staircase leading nowhere. Even after the work returns to happier viewpoints, the image lingers.

Performed by his septet, Marsalis’ music inspires Fagan to a new plateau of mastery. He can make a dancer painfully moving on his back into a metaphoric hero and, through a fusion of technical rigor and cathartic power, shape an ensemble of 14 into an affirmation of modern dance as the preeminent expressive idiom of this century. Clearly, after 23 years, a company that Fagan once named the Bottom of the Bucket has at last reached the top of the heap.