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Kate Digby is a young dance maker in transition. Back in 2003 she created Molt, a solo for herself in which she portrays the blossoming of a country wallflower. To Ben Harper’s raucous jamming, she quivers her paws, knocks her knees, and sickles her feet in a cringing style reminiscent of Caitlin Corbett’s 1984 solo Wigwam Ladies. In the course of a couple minutes, she adds a layer of coyness, flirtation, and eventually a few steps of the Charleston. Confidence is her tonic. In the program she presented at Roxbury Community College last weekend, Digby demonstrated that if she is not yet completely a butterfly, she is shucking her bland caterpillar aspect. During the past year, 28-year-old Digby has grabbed some of New England’s best choreographic opportunities. She has earned grants from state and local agencies (including the far-seeing LEF Foundation) and enjoyed residencies at Concord Academy’s Summer Stages Dance program and on Martha’s Vineyard, where she spent a month at the Yard. She knows she has been very fortunate, but the results are more visible in the ways she has reworked older repertory than in the dances she has created over the past few months. Part of her company’s improvement comes from being able to rehearse adequately. More, I think, is that she has had the benefit of outside mentors and time to reconsider some of her choreographic decisions. Here/Waiting (a title that pays tribute to Bill T. Jones’s 1994 Still/Here) was a work in progress when she premiered it at World Music/CRASHarts’ "Dance Straight Up!" in 2005. Now it has more judicious energy. Digby looks up into the rafters and reels back as if trying to gain the sense of an impossibly high skyscraper. Her dancers — Erin Gottwald, Maggie Husak, and Kimberly Miller — join her, ponytails swaying over their casual polo shirts, their arms pulling them through swinging walks and spirals. In the second part, they join hands over Macedonian grapevine steps, swiveling on their heels. They leap with heavily bent legs like Picasso’s 1920s giantesses running across the beach. In Here/Waiting Digby repeats shapes and gestures from different and sometimes eccentric points of view, as when the dancers lying on their backs "row" themselves into the wings. There’s similar care in Digby’s reworking of her 2001 Bound, Boundless, Bounding where, to Yellow River modalities, the ensemble in their black suit jackets run in real time instead of theatrical dreamtime: fast is fast and slow is slow. But the excitement of the piece — and in Warp and Woof, a silly, swooning duet plus "Greek chorus" of society ladies set to the crooning of Maurice Chevalier — rests with the precocious charisma of 16-year-old Zack Winokur. Poised adolescent ballerinas are commonplace, but a young man with such clarity of timing and gesture is rare. Apparently, Winokur was a soccer star and sometime tap dancer before he took up modern dance at the Concord Academy three years ago. He’s already slated to appear in a Karol Armitage production in New York this winter. I can’t report that Digby Dance’s No Such Thing, her work in progress about television’s top models, idols, and apprentices, is ready for prime time. The way the dancers in their gym clothes cock their hips and smirk is too obvious to be interesting, and there’s no logical development between the ways they seek approval (a recorded voice purrs, "Is this what you had in mind?") and their eventual, vibrating resistance. But give Kate Digby another year or two and a few good mentors and she may turn this into something worth watching. Boston has set another fledgling choreographer on her way. Who knows what the results will be? Kate Digby has already rented an apartment in Brooklyn.
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