Step Lively: Robert Henry Johnson Company in Fourth-Season Opener. First published in Bay Area Reporter, July 18, 1996. © Wendell Ricketts, 1996, 2003. All rights reserved.
The Robert Henry Johnson Dance Company, in the first program of its fourth repertory season last week at Fort Mason's Cowell Theater, gave audiences a show that was both more-and a little less-than one might have wanted. More because Johnson continues to extend both his reach and his grasp and because he consistently associates himself with some of the most charismatic and watchable dancers on the Bay Area scene. And less because one almost feels that Johnson is moving a little too fast, the depth and focus of his work suffering slightly as his canon grows prodigiously.
Johnson's July 11th opening night was, nonetheless, the most impressive showing he could have made of six years of achievement-and of the themes and dynamics he has, in a sense, made his own. For perhaps the first time, Johnson's audience had the opportunity to experience, all in one sitting, a solid, cohesive body of work; a mature but permeable aesthetic; and a technique that combines elements of Johnson's broad and eclectic training into a vocabulary that's as unique to Johnson as his fingerprints.
For the last three seasons, however, the question has emerged-and Program I doesn't entirely resolve it-whether Johnson will take that vocabulary and fashion long, articulate movement poems with it, or whether he will settle for sound bites, catchy raps, and facile rhymes. Indeed, it must be difficult to be as talented as Johnson is. When most anything you do evokes gasps, it's got to be hard to tell whether audiences are gasping because you've pulled something genuinely breathtaking out of yourself and your dancers or whether they're just starved for dance that touches them.
But every piece in Johnson's Program I-even the ones that haven't entirely gelled-has the threads of his talent woven brightly throughout. Johnson's The Learning Ground, for example, a fine enough composition when its first movement premiered here in early 1995, has so vastly improved with the completion of the second section, Phylia, that it seems almost a different work.
Borrowing a leaf from the book of the artist formerly known as Prince, whose "Purple Rain" is the score for Phylia, costume designer Darbury Stenderu has created red velveteen doublets and capes that give the piece just the right freaky-deaky, post-psychedelic feel. Another brilliant lighting scheme by Jack Carpenter paints the entire cast in shocking, fiery orange.
Johnson's movement for Phylia is strenuous, sexy, and driving, never yielding the slightest quarter to the score's growling electric guitar. Johnson, who has a way with a duet, creates a partnership between Tomis McDonnell and Sarah Fanoe that's completely riveting, as much in the gravity-flouting lifts as in the gentle, elegant series of penches they perform, side by side, early in the section.
Fanoe truly shone here for the first time in the program, and even McDonnell, a longtime member of RHJDC, evinced a focus, masculinity, and intensity that had been veiled in the evening's other works. (It helped that, for the performance of Phylia, McDonnell took his long hair out of the Our Gang knots he'd been wearing and doffed his geeky glasses; he deserves better than to be reined in with that kind of sight gag.)
One of the things you see with a piece like Phylia-and perhaps even more so with Hothouse Flowers, a 1994 duet that is fast becoming the RHJDC's signature work; and Blue Light Til Dawn, a premiere whose central couple, SF Ballet's Ikolo Griffin and Yolanda Jordan, nearly melted the marley with sensuality and heat-is Johnson's apparently bottomless ability to plumb the male-female dynamic.
Whether that dynamic expresses itself in direct content (seductions, lovers' meetings and partings); a subterranean consciousness (he often uses tension between a male and a female dancer to provide the drama and mystery for a piece while leaving the details of their specific scenario enigmatic); or-for want of a better word-as a spiritual essence or archetype, Johnson always finds something new there.
Certainly, the wars and alliances between the genders are a popular topic for modern-dance choreographers-one might even say the topic. Think of Twyla Tharp's Sinatra Songs or Paul Taylor's Sunset. But it can easily go tragically wrong. A vapid piece like Helgi Tomasson's Nanna's Lied, for example, would almost lead one to believe that dance had little left to say about relations between the sexes. And that's part of what makes Johnson's achievement particularly notable.
But Johnson does get off his stride occasionally. Ives, set to Charles Ives songs, is slight and forgettable, even if danced gorgeously and with impeccable placement by the long-limbed Yolanda Jordan. And Wooden Horses, which the program describes as "a very work in progress," was perhaps not ready to be shown. It's a sweeping piece, whose subject is the colonization of the "new" world by Columbus, but neither the text nor the movement quite fit the other. Finally, Angelitos Negros, a solo choreographed and danced by Elvia Marta, was a wrong step. The song, performed in a recording by Roberta Flack, is sublime; the dance was repetitive and pinched. A Johnson-created solo, on the other hand, would be welcome leavening for a future bill.
The RHJDC's Fourth Repertory Season continues through July 21 with the premiere of Johnson's first evening-length work, BIO, a section of which (Late Night in the Upper Room), debuted at Johnson's Center for the Arts concert in October 1995. BIO will be accompanied live by the 10-piece hip-hop group, Midnight Voices, a six-year old ensemble founded by lyricists and composers Will Power and Mohammed Bilal, who created the original score for BIO.