Marking Its 50th, Limon Troupe Takes a Risk, Soars

Long before Alvin Ailey founded a multi-ethnic modern dance repertory company, Jose Limon showed him the way. Long before the heirs of Ailey, Balanchine and Graham wondered how to continue after the deaths of their founders, the Limon Dance Company offered an enlightened example. And, to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the company brought to Cal State L.A. another risky innovation: taking a major Limon creation out of mothballs and deciding that changes must be made.

Back in 1966 (six years before his death), Limon choreographed “The Winged” as a plotless, unaccompanied 50-minute suite--but added a patchwork of incidental music and sound effects just before opening night. However, the version seen at the Luckman Theatre on Saturday ran about 35 minutes and featured a commissioned 1995 score by young African-born composer Jon Magnussen, a score that represented Magnussen’s response to the dancing--the emotions, styles and instrumental colors it evoked for him.

The result proved a refreshing reversal of watching choreographers visualize music (inescapable nowadays). Instead, it allowed the audience to hear Magnussen put a personal spin on preexisting action in the manner of the best film composers. And, at long last, the beauties and contrasts of a large-scale work celebrating wings of all sorts (on birds, insects, mythological creatures) emerged with ideal vividness in this edited, rescored version.

With the company augmented by members of Limon West (based in San Jose), the 13-member cast skillfully conveyed the minute changes of weight and body sculpture that define the piece’s shifting metaphors. In the opening “Dawn Chorus,” the ensemble juxtaposed soaring physical freedom with small, fluttering hand motions, suggesting birds seen simultaneously from a distance and up close, the overview and the details.

After that, Limon introduced “Eros” shooting his arrows, a “Duel” between two powerful and majestic males, the quivering and insectile “Feast of Harpies” for five women, plus dance magic galore: the illusion of dancers being pulled up from the floor into the air on a single breath; a stylized arms-flung-wide motif (one arm bent at the elbow, the other fully extended) that grew into a heroic emblem of wingedness--ultimately, perhaps, the wings of angels.

For all its elegance of design, “The Winged” achieved a looser, more spontaneous creativity than earlier Limon masterworks and thus represented an important breakthrough in his career. It belonged to the future of modern dance, just as his formal, architectural “Missa Brevis” from 1958 belonged to the past. In the latter, Limon assumed the task of physicalizing both the score by Zoltan Kodaly and a concept of a religious ritual as a crucible of yearning.

With the men in the 16-member cast reaching up to form pointed Gothic arches as they moved and the women held aloft like feast-day effigies, the key images established a sense of grounded solidity and set in motion the efforts of individuals to transcend or escape it. Company artistic director Carla Maxwell brought great authority to the “Crucifixus” sequence, moving brokenly to her death past a low railing formed by kneeling dancers with linked arms.

To Carlos Orta fell the challenge of reconciling suffering and hope in a single dancing body, a task accomplished with imposing passion and the nobility of bearing that continues to make Limon style an inimitable vision of the highest human potential.