Ballet Review 44.2

Summer 2016

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From the current issue…

Garth Fagan

by Susanna Sloat

Garth Fagan is one of the few great choreographers working today. It’s not a secret, but I think this is insufficiently acknowledged. He is a master of polyrhythmic bodies, of complexities and changes of movement and theme.  His work burrows deep and explodes joyfully…  In an aftertalk, he explained that he listens to the music he will use for a piece over and over.  He has it in his head when he choreographs, but it isn’t playing, so that even the dancers are surprised when they hear the music while they dance and find that it all fits together, sometimes in surprising ways…

Robert Greenidge’s irresistible steelpan calypso line and a deep horn ride over an infectious rhythm throughout Geoffrey Holder Life Fete…  Bacchanal, a tribute to the late Trinidadian-born choreographer and artist that Jamaican-born Fagan first presented at Lincoln Center Out of Doors.  Then it was part of an evening dedicated to Holder, with a gospel choir and Carmen de Lavallade performing Holder’s The Creation, plus a full set of pieces by Garth Fagan Dance. Revised for the Joyce, its title now encompasses fete and bacchanal, two Trinidadian terms for a party.  And party the dancers do in the two outer movements, doing at times a very complicated stop and go version of a carnival trudge, with pauses, pulses, balances, slinks…

In the central section [Norwood] Pennewell solos, extending his long limbs, as Leo Holder, against the now softly repeating calypso, speaks of his father on his deathbed, still full of ideas.  He remembers his parents, Holder and de Lavallade, and their enduring love, as Adriene Barber joins Pennewell in a wonderfully tender, loving, sexy duet, the two entwining, balancing in precarious extensions.  They are a virtuosic but totally involved – and involving couple.  As he is dying, his son tells us, Holder is still very much alive. 

The two are still linked when the others strut in with a variety of moves. Three couples remain, starting slowly with extensions, coupling, until the rest trudge in, shaking shoulders, rounding hips, many dance moves evolving out of this life fete.  In the Caribbean, as in Africa, death is often remembered with dance…

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