White Bird Dance review: Garth Fagan's 'Griot New York' shows ...

In many traditional societies of West Africa, a griot is the voice of the culture, a storyteller, historian and commentator. As described in program notes to ?Griot New York,? the 1991 collaboration between the choreographer Garth Fagan, the jazz composer Wynton Marsalis and the sculptor Martin Puryear, it refers to someone who preserves and transmits people?s history and traditions in song, dance and verse.

?Griot New York,? which the strikingly talented ensemble of Garth Fagan Dance performed at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Wednesday night, is Fagan?s contemporary take on that ancient function, a series of heartfelt, at once earthy and poetic dances that carry a sense of African and African-American identity amid what the presenting company White Bird describes as a ?tribute to the look and sound of the pulsating city.?

What specific stories or commentaries Fagan might intend isn?t always clear -- perhaps that?s for the best. ?The Disenfranchised,? which opened the second half of the program, came closest to social commentary, with dancers stumbling around languidly in tattered clothing, looking a bit like a very attractive zombie underclass.

Rather, the riches of ?Griot New York? are in the execution more than the concept. As the esteemed dance critic Martha Ullman West remarked during intermission Wednesday, what was most notable in Fagan?s choreography and the performance of his troupe was the remarkable musicality of the dancing.

Perhaps, though, this is as much part of Fagan?s concept as any narrative or metaphorical trappings. As he once put it in a segment for the public television series ?Dance in America,? his dancers ?dance from the inside out...I want to see the soul behind the movement.?

Which could be one way of describing what it means for dance to have musicality.

We might also look to notions of fluency and fluidity, to the subtleties of articulation and embellishment. Both music and dance concern time and motion, and work best when the those two phenomena seem married, indivisible.

In any case, you could see musicality -- and understand intuitively that there?s nothing paradoxical about the phrase -- in the dizzyingly quick turns the dancers made as the whipped across the stage in the playful opener ?City Court Dance.? Or, from that same piece, in the joyful hop, executed with one leg kicking high in the air, that looked like a modernist borrowing from the Lindy Hop. Or in the exquisite tonal control (a function of strength, balance and a keen sense of expressive understatement) shown by Norwood Pennewell and Nicolette Depass in the slow, tender duet ?Spring Yaounde.?? Or the sinuous, casually sexy, hip-rotating walk that gave a distinctly Caribbean feel to ?Oracabessa Sea.?

Perhaps the secret skill of the griot lies less in what you say than how you say it.

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index.ssf/2012/02/white_bird_dance_review_garth.html

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