E-Mail This Article to a Friend Invoking the spirits Ronald K. Brown/Evidence; Boston Ballet’s La Sylphide BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
	Ronald K. Brown/Evidence At Zero Arrow Theatre (closed). La Sylphide Choreography by Sorella Englund after August Bournonville. Music by Herman Løvenskjold. Set and costumes by Peter Cazalet. Lighting by Pierre Lavoie. With the Boston Ballet Orchestra conducted by Jonathan McPhee. Presented by Boston Ballet at the Wang Theatre through March 13.

There hasn’t been an American modern-dance choreographer since Ruth St. Denis as committed to a spiritual journey as Ronald K. Brown. CRASHarts presented the Boston premiere of Evidence, the company Brown founded in 1985, at Zero Arrow Theatre last weekend. Brown has developed a remarkable movement style that draws on West African and African-diasporic traditions plus an array of other sources. No one else’s dance looks like this, and though he’s choreographed for other companies, it’s his own chamber group who perform it with galvanic authenticity. In addition to himself, Camille Brown, Tiffany Jackson, Keon C. Thoulouis, Arcell Cabuag, Juel Lane, and Shani Collins all came across as individuals.

The three pieces on the program riffed on popular songs and Afro musical selections. Like tribal dances, they all maintained an ongoing pulse, a kind of motor over which the dancers produced what seemed like an unending stream of rhythmic elaborations. The body is fully active all the time, the legs stroking out or down into the ground, the arms in continual play. The dancers work to the max, but somehow they don’t look exhausted. With this rhythmic beat that keeps pumping new energy into it, the dance could go on all night as long as the music lasts.

Brown doesn’t develop the spatial groupings and traveling designs that map our way through a lot of other dance — think Mark Morris or Paul Taylor, for instance. The dances that seem to be Brown’s models aren’t discursive in visual terms, and they risk the attrition of interest that Western audiences often experience when world dance forms are transplanted to our theaters. These dances depend on rhythmic and gestural patterns to bring about change, transcendence, transformation. They penetrate the ordinary sense of time to get to another psychic level.

St. Denis made her connection with the Infinite by imitating the costumes, poses, and gestures of the gods as depicted in paintings and carvings. By re-creating their dances, she hoped to become possessed by their spirits. Ron Brown’s dances reach beyond the secular life too, with a general spirituality and a marvelous unfolding of a physical language, but his more specific references to historic events or fictional characters, uprisings and suffering, are conveyed through verbal synopses and explanations rather than enacted on the stage. The dance itself may have generic gestures of prayer, pleading, swearing, but its drama works a different way.

Upside Down (1998), excerpted from the evening-length Destiny, introduced the company and the movement: the grounded step and the rebounding afterbeat; the clicking contractions somewhere high under the ribs; the grapevine-twisting legs; the curling, thrusting arms that seemed to grow out of the upper back; the jumping sequences that described whole landscapes in the air. A program note supplied to the press but not to the audience describes a ritual of mourning, a story of abused power and rebellion. It did seem that the movement was growing more and more reckless, but the rhythm kept it from getting out of control. Toward the end, a man was carried out by a procession of women.

Come Ye (2003) was accompanied by militant songs by Nina Simone and Fela Kuti. I didn’t catch most of the lyrics, but the dance began with African " digging " movements and simultaneous individual phrases in a bumping, halting rhythm. Then, after an apparent prayer session, the beat accelerated and the dancers assembled into organized groups and line-ups that spun off a series of solos.

Grace (1999) has been seen here in the repertory of the Alvin Ailey company. Camille Brown took the role of the priestess figure with an extraordinary solo of sudden switches between mellow, gliding movements and a jagged, nervous watchfulness. Later on, the others did the phrases with her, as if going through a process of healing or conversion.

SPIRITS OF ANOTHER KIND inhabited Boston Ballet’s new production of La Sylphide, the Romantic ballet classic, in which both the heroine and the villain have supernatural powers. The Sylph belongs to the wind and the forest, an ephemeral creature who unwisely falls in love with a mortal. Before she can entice James to cross over to her ghostly plane, Madge the Witch destroys them both. Madge is the Sylph’s opposite — a scary, earthy presence who’s capable of volcanic rage and magic. James has insulted her by throwing her out of the house when she’s crept in to get warm. All of this happens as James is about to get married, and Effy, the disappointed bride, ends up with Gurn, who’s loved her all along and is never going to go gallivanting off after a fairy.

La Sylphide (1836) is the best-known ballet of August Bournonville, who developed an endearing style and repertory over his 40-year career as choreographer and director of the Royal Danish Ballet. One reason Boston is so fortunate to have this production is that it demands more subtlety in dancing and acting than the more familiar story ballets of the late-19th and 20th centuries. Like Swan Lake, it tests the resources of a ballet company, but in a different way.

Bournonville ballets are noted for their irrepressible dancing, and for a psychological and pictorial realism that later hardened into the more generalized behaviors of the high classics. In Bournonville and other ballets of the Romantic period, people from different classes, nationalities, and temperaments become involved with each other. To some extent, they can determine how their lives will come out; they’re not pawns of fate or the prevailing monarchy. La Sylphide invites us to think about tradition and community, about insiders and outsiders, about the limits of dreaming and imagination. It asks how far off the path of respectability a person can stray before being swallowed by chaos.

The current production has received the most attention for its acting potential, but La Sylphide is more than a story ballet. Within its compact two acts, it shows off the company’s virtuoso dancing and stylistic versatility. In addition to solo variations, there’s a formal chorus of sylphs and a charming Highland dance for the company, including children. Bournonville style requires an exacting technique — scintillating batterie and step combinations, soaring jumps and quick changes of rhythm — always supported by an active upper body. The dancer’s head, shoulders, chest, even the eyes, are coordinated with the step vocabulary, so that expression isn’t separate from dancing.

I didn’t expect Lorna Feijóo to be a persuasive Sylph; she’s not a diaphanous type. But her footwork showed us clarity and detail, and she even made me believe the character. After she’s shown James the treasures of the forest — the flowers, the brook, the bird she catches — she gives him one more surprise: with a wave of the hand, she makes a whole corps of sixteen sylphs appear. Later, when he wraps her in the poisoned scarf, what she experiences, for the first time, is passion. In the moment of discovering sexual love, she dies.

In the two casts I saw, I thought Carlos Molina’s James and John Lam’s Gurn conveyed the expansiveness of Bournonville’s male style. Romi Beppu as the lead sylph seemed to catch onto the idea of épaulement that’s so distinctive in Bournonville. The slope of the upper back, the slight oppositional thrust of a shoulder, the sideward-leading jumps that can make the whole body go joyously off-balance for an instant — this is part of what makes these characters so charming.

Sorella Englund, who directed this fine production, was a wonderful Sylph herself, and in the Bournonville tradition, she later went into character roles. Madge has been danced in travesty (I’ve seen Erik Bruhn, among others), but when former ballerinas take the part, the audience gets an added subtext about destroyed beauty, depleted physical perfection. Englund’s Madge once had decent feelings, you imagined, but she couldn’t forgive James for making her an outcast in front of the wedding guests. After she’s paid him back, she stands over his fallen body at the final curtain, with a look of dismay.

Former New York City Ballet principal Merrill Ashley was my other Madge, an interesting challenge for the prodigious Balanchine ballerina. Her Madge was vain, spiteful. She told fortunes with cramped, abrupt gestures and gleefully stirred up the nasty brew to poison the scarf. When she met James in the forest, she still seemed to be thinking of herself as a glamorous, desirable woman, and she teased him with suggestions of the pleasures he’d have with the Sylph, maybe getting a little thrill of her own out of the mocking seduction.

August Bournonville’s bicentennial will be celebrated this June in Copenhagen with a festival featuring all nine of his extant ballets. For information, visit www.bournonvillefestival.dk