Garth Fagan used to call his company Bottom of the Bucket, But . . . Well, the hopeful But . . . has come home to roost. Flushed with Fagan’s success as choreographer of The Lion King and many paragraphs of stellar achievements, the company now goes by the more confident title Garth Fagan Dance. Still based in Rochester, New York, it performed at the Emerson Majestic last weekend in a FleetBoston Celebrity Series event.
Fagan is known for his original modern-dance technique and for the dancers he’s trained. Prelude: " Discipline Is Freedom, " which opened the program, was a theatricalized demonstration of that technique, echoing the Martha Graham classic A Dancer’s World. It started with a solo and gradually expanded to include all 12 company members. Norwood Pennewell’s balances on one leg with elaborations — turns, arms, changes in the torso — made an exemplary lead-in to the simulated dance class. The other dancers entered in groups and progressed from stretches, pliés, and loosening-up exercises to pirouettes, turns, leg extensions, and jumps and then to a series of combinations going across the floor with the hardest, fastest locomotion and the fanciest leaps.
One almost uncanny specialty of this company is the dancers’ ability to spin through a space with an even, stepping rhythm while their arms whip into counter-rhythmic shapes around their upper bodies. Some of the advanced combinations took on the step patterns and shoulder contractions of African dance. Eventually they were falling and rolling across the floor, as if simply running didn’t give their bodies enough chance to luxuriate in circular space.
Thinking back over the evening later, I was sorry the concert started with this piece. It left few surprises for the four other dances on the program. Fagan’s strength as a choreographer, and I appreciate it, is his formalism. He makes the stage highly visible and energized all the time, with meticulously laid-out groups that work in exact unison or clearly deployed counterpoint. The dancers’ movement is minutely calibrated in space and time; you never feel confused or caught in between ideas.
Fagan’s choreography consists of accumulated but discrete moves and small phrases. Each move has its particular speed or emphasis; it’s either precisely placed or flung or dangled. The moves are like isolated facts, often making the audience go, " Oooh, I could never do that! " But they don’t develop or resonate specifically against the dance’s loftier themes.
Maybe Fagan’s movement vocabulary isn’t as limited as it seemed, but I kept noticing how it fell into just a few big tropes. There are different inflections of the dancer’s long balance on one leg, for instance, but whether the working leg is to the front or the side, whether the standing leg is bent or in relevé, whether the body tilts or wiggles, what’s impressive is how long and steadily he or she can stay anchored.
A relief from all this abstraction was Natalie Rogers’s solo in Dance Psalmody 69, one of three excerpts from a 1985 work, Never Top 40 (Juke Box). To Ludovico Vidana’s 1602 setting of " Exaudi me Domine " ( " Hear me O Lord " ) sung by countertenor Alfred Deller, Rogers hinged way back on her legs and pulled upright. Beneath a projection that implied a stained-glass window, she focused intently off toward some unseen Power, protesting, pleading, insisting, looking in vain for comfort.
Fagan’s dances are liberally supplied with clues to their intent — subtitles, poetic epigraphs, interesting music and musical annotations. But this information remained in its own realm, unattached to the objective, all-purpose choreography. In Memoriam, a dedicatory piece after September 11, might as well have been called " Prelude. " The eight dancers performed the movement in a serious way, but it was the music that moved me — a motet by the Renaissance composer Cristóbal de Morales with contemporary saxophone obbligato (the recorded performance was by Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble), a sort of response from our time.
Music of the Line/Words in the Shape (2001) added personal contact to the movement possibilities, with trios and duets that involved lifting, but the dance didn’t really give in to the galvanic propulsiveness and Ivesian dissonance of John Adams’s music.
Woza, to four Afropop selections by Lebo M, began with a monumental pose: Sharon Skepple, planted, pitched over double. She slowly extended one leg up into a split, to the gasps of the audience, then pretzeled her free limbs around. The dance continued in a more upbeat and festive mood but again featured kinky poses and lifts. Five pairs of bodies knotted together on the floor with Pilobolus-like intricacy. The final celebration wound up with fast, flung turns and stopped balances, and even the smiles were choreographed.
