Dance-jazz pairing eloquently in step
In a dance-and-jazz program marked most by captivating solos, Isaiah Bindel was just getting warmed up when he unfurled a stretchy, expansive turn at the top of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater bill on Friday, Aug. 24. By the end of the two-hour evening, a collaboration by Dawson DanceSF and saxophonist/composer Richard Howell, this dynamic stalwart of choreographer Gregory Dawson’s troupe had made one keen impression after another.
In the fittingly titled “Isaiah’s Solo,” a highlight of the “Mangaku” world premiere, Bindel seemed to have tapped a new mid-body power source, his torso flexing, compressing and bursting up straight. In “Charlie Mac,” a selection from Dawson’s “Floating in Mid-Air,” Bindel demonstrated his knack for playing well with others, engaging the potent Erik Debono in a bare-chested game of leapfrog and other gambits. Bindel was back later on in “Mangaku,” teaming up with David Calhoun and Debono again in “Dude in Black.” And there this proud, commanding dancer was in the program’s company finale, right at the center of it all.
Bindel was by no means
the one only drawing focus. In a night when the men overall shone more brightly than the women, Lauren Worley insisted attention must be paid in her taut, gyroscopically torqued solo “Floating.” Taylor Jordan and Elizabeth Pischel led the way in “Chef Says,” a percolating female duet that kept adding and doubling its ingredients along the way.
Howell, performing onstage with an excellent band, was an essential solo force in his own right from beginning to end. By turns lyrical, tart and desperate, his soprano saxophone riffs served as both structure and sometimes divergent commentary on the dance.
Dawson didn’t so much set his choreography to the music — although there were certainly passages of highly ordered movement, especially for the ensemble — but allowed Howell’s exploratory turns to unleash his dancers’ exuberant style.
The jazz seemed to free and excite everyone. The steps, some jazzinflected in a Bob Fosse vein, with smartly angled elbows and ankles, or one arm sassily pinioned to the waist, had an insouciant, energetic drive. When he broke into sung lyrics, in “Mangaku,” Howell insisted the sky was the limit. “Dance on the mountain,” he urged in his throaty rasp. “Sing to the stars.” Later on, he made it more personal: “Love is all I have to give.
It was invigorating, as it always is, to have live rather than taped music in the house. The score for the world premiere came from Howell’s recent album, “Coming of Age — Mangaku.”
“Floating in Mid-Air,” which premiered this year at the Bayview Opera House, was the stronger and tighter of the evening’s two works. Dawson, who likes to put his dancers on the floor and bring them wriggling to upright life, did that early on in “Floating.” Some multiple partnering, done with the dancers’ backs to the audience, was strangely intimate, as if the viewers were being allowed behind the scenes to see how it was done.
Even when the dancing seemed to labor a bit, in an effortful pas de deux, there was something winning about the sometimes gawky struggles the dancers underwent. The bright-lights Broadway pizzazz gave the finale an exclamation point. No curtain call followed; it would have blurred the effect.
The 55-minute “Mangaku,” some of whose 13 sections bore such catchy if unilluminating titles as “Liz Taylor” and “Moon Over Tiburon,” was more diffuse and meandering. The duets began to run together and repeat themselves. Dawson’s ensemble passages tended toward pattern-challenged crowd scenes or lines. Execution wasn’t always crisp or precise. The multicolored longsleeved costumes added visual interest without helping articulate the scene.
Whether alone onstage with the musicians or played off against a shadowed mass of dancers off to one side, it was Bindel and the other exhilarating soloists who made this collaboration pay off.