Dance Celebration's 'Lindy to Hip-Hop'

When everybody faced the music and danced

LEWIS WHITTINGTON

Annenberg Center’s Dance Celebration Series is featuring a season-long theme of commissioned choreography set to rock ‘n roll music. So far it has brought limp offerings from visiting companies. There was the rec-room impersonation of James Brown, the tepid blue-collar worker vignettes of working-class life set to the music of Bruce Springsteen and some fun plus a few gratuitous disco memories. But for the most part, there was little rock in this roll.

Guess what? Artistic director Randy Swartz got it right when he enlisted the hometown team of Roni Koresh, Myra Bazell and Brian Sanders to put on a full show. Their opus (no other word for it) 'The Music that Made Us Dance: From Lindy to Hip-Hop” offered a collective battalion of 37 dancers who beat all the rest off the Annenberg floor.

As several of the visiting troupes had demonstrated, choreographing to well-known songs presents problems, not the least being the different nostalgic expectations that have to be used or erased for something contextually more meaningful. After all, most dance crazes rely on a social attitude and a repeated step, a combination that goes only so far on a formal dance stage. If it’s too stylized, the dances look false, diluted or thematically bloated.

All about sex, drugs and rock 'n roll

None of these pitfalls presented problems in “The Music that Made Us Dance.” The meeting of this artistic triumvirate was made in heaven and– thank the gods– hell. It was obvious that these dancers know all about sex, drugs and rock and roll (even if all I really know first-hand is that Roni Koresh smokes cigarettes).

Koresh Dance Company has a strong corps of versatile dancers and choreography with a world -diverse flair. Bazell's Scrap Performance Group and its later incarnations, features fetishistic tableaux, sardonic and sexually charged movement. Sanders' theatrical adventures as founder of JUNK turn his physical dance comedy, acrobatics and cartoonish character dancers into live “animation” theater. Together these choreographers created an artistic lightning-bolt of relevant dance-theater that not only archives social dances but also echoes what they symbolized from their time.

Even within a particular style, era or technique, the choreographic variation in this concert was stunning. It wasn't enough for the choreographers to time capsule a half-century of dance crazes from the jitterbug to rap; they also evoked the greening and withering of the American Dream. Here are some of the highlights from so many unexpected moments in this concert that just swept you through 50 years of dance and life.

Koresh's unsentimental nostalgia brought the ‘40s-‘50s section alive. He started on the ceiling with Benny Goodman's “Sing, Sing, Sing” with that era-defining drum solo by Gene Krupa. Standing in front of a rail of floodlights, MC Michael Valdez grabbed a ‘40s-era microphone and stated the themes while dancing a lindy hop that morphed into a jitterbug.

Koresh knows the difference between the meek tri-step on American Bandstand and the real jitterbug of the Savoy Ballroom. I even saw a flying Charleston step (for elite jitters) and we even learned what sexual and drug behavior gave the jitterbug its name.

Peggy Lee's “Fever” had five women in men's shirts vamping off of sizzling bongo echoes. Elvis's “Hound Dog” turned into an all- out dance brawl between a young couple, with the famous drum roll turning the man’s face into a punching bag.

The men took over for Nat King Cole's “Route 66” in a hit-the-road-Jack soft shoe with Jerome Robbins touches characterized by cocky glissades and airy barrel rolls. Ella Fitzgerald's minted version of “Night and Day” was a balletic ballroom waltz for three couples (men in relaxed tuxes, women in chartreuse satin dance gowns)— straightforward nuanced romanticism. More direct sexual energy was displayed in “All the Way” sung by Billie Holiday, in which dancers’ body wraps and hyperextensions told a very intimate tale. Those were the days, my friend. Or were they?

From '60s protest to disco

Myra Bazell started took on the ‘60s and ‘70s, her troupe dancing in slow-motion time that jogged the memory and stirred the soul. With protest gestures of societal defiance and liberation, the body language instantly evoked the ‘60s.

This “Funked Up” segment kept evolving into a scalding docu-dance essay of social upheaval, freedom and its costs, the fight for civil liberation and how some protesters kept the faith and others didn't. The iconic score moves back and forth from popular songs to fragments from civil-rights leaders Martin Luther King and Huey Newton and news shards of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X. The dancers’ breakout into real funk reminded me of the famous jacket of Marvin Gaye's classic album, I Want You.

Bazell's rich textures and flowing group configurations during Gil Scott Heron's sociopolitical manifesto “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” illuminated the spirit of social consciousness lost in time. The haunting end image is a frieze with everybody in an upside-down on their heads, hands or shoulders.
That's not to say Bazell didn't have fun too. Her trio of girls in sturdy shark-skin A-line dresses, circa 1965, doing the jerk, hully-gully and Madison, were more than just go-go-ghosts. But how, I wondered, did everybody trade in their protest armbands of the ‘60s for the polyester disco shirts and skirts of the ‘70s? Bazell's finale is a bump bust-a-move Soul Train line that foreshadows the rise of break dancing and hip-hop.

A rifle and fatigues: It's Vietnam!

Brian Sanders's ‘70s-‘80s "Tardis" (for "Time And Relative Dimension In Space") began with the theme to Dr. Who. Jennifer Binford-Johnson appeared through a London Police box with flowers in hand, strolling to “Sing a Song.” Suddenly Sanders burst onstage with rifle and fatigues to Edwin Starr's Vietnam antiwar anthem “War (What is it good for?)” and mowed her and her flowers down. Sanders disappeared and re-entered as Richard Nixon doing the hustle with Binford-Johnson, who summarily beat him up.

A sequined and boa-ed Sanders flew around as a Studio 54 fairy during B.J.Thomas's 'Everything is Beautiful' but was upstaged when a streaker who dashed across the stage. Sanders morphed into a gay San Fran clone in tight disco pants and floppy mustache and mile-high platform heals doing the lewdest grind imaginable to Donna Summer's “Dim All the Lights.”

The disco era died as the ‘80s ”Morning in America” decade and a far more ominous time began. The next section­­– Sanders's harsh and sterile “The New Wave”– created a chrome and plastique netherworld set to ‘80s techo-pop from Bronski Beat, Depeche Mode and the Eurythmics.

Koresh's finale brought us to the present, including mixes of his signature communal dances, indigenous to mid-Eastern regions and cultures. Globalization is possible at least on the dance stage.

The songs and the dances in “The Music that made us dance” blew my mind, busted my gut and broke my heart.