Limon Troupe, Getting a Virtuosi Lift

The program at Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center featured "Missa Brevis," inspired by Jose Limon's 1950s visit to war-ravaged Poland. (By Scott Groler)

The first rule of dancing well is to find a good partner. Thursday night, the pairing of the Limon Dance Company and the period-instrument ensemble American Virtuosi proved an especially satisfying one, transcending the great joy of simply having any live music at all at a modern dance performance.

The substantial boost that American Virtuosi provided to the program, performed at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, was felt from its very first notes -- those of Lar Lubovitch's "Concerto Six Twenty-Two," named for the music that accompanies it, Mozart's Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, K. 622. Lubovitch, a noted choreographer in his own right, was a longtime student of company founder Jose Limon. To mark its 60th anniversary -- and an amazing 34-year existence after the death of its founder-- the company is touring Limon classics (such as "The Moor's Pavane" and "Missa Brevis," which rounded out this program) as well as works by Limon disciples such as Lubovitch. His "Concerto Six Twenty-Two," created 20 years ago, is a bright, big-hearted romp, but this performance brought out its singing, tender core.

Throughout the evening, one was struck by the musicality of the dancing, and -- not to take anything away from Limon, Lubovitch and the excellent dancers -- a lot of credit is due conductor Kenneth Hamrick, artistic director of American Virtuosi. He and his group contributed a lively alertness and buoyancy, to which the dancers responded in equal measure.

Lubovitch's work was great fun, which one felt almost viscerally -- watching the dancers charge and soar was akin to bodysurfing the crests of a clarinet sea. He peppered the beginning and end of his work with a few too many visual jokes, however, so the spare nobility of the central Adagio movement came as a surprise and a revelation. It was a slow, careful study of two men -- Kurt Douglas, boneless and supple as warm wax, and Jonathan Riedel, the larger of the two and as strong as a Clydesdale. Most rewarding was the even tone of their dancing, whether in sustained shows of muscle or swift, airborne feats of impeccable coordination; the two men breathed together, and together with the woodwinds.

Watching the stately patterns and assertive rhythmic thrust of Limon's "The Moor's Pavane," it is amazing to think that he created the work (in 1949) before he'd found the Purcell score that ultimately accompanied it. But composing in silence allowed Limon to focus on form; the dance hangs on the repeated phrases of coming together and stepping apart of the pavane, a Renaissance dance that couples and uncouples partners much the way a square dance does today.

It is this process of bringing the four dancers together and then splintering them and regrouping them that, to Limon, suggested a parallel to the conspiracies and deceptions in Shakespeare's "Othello." Rather than tell the story of the Moor and how he turned on his devoted Desdemona, Limon wanted to evoke the human mechanisms at work. It's a brilliant distillation, rendered with exquisite restraint and given extra drive and color on Thursday by the musicians' treatment of Purcell's "Abdelazer." The strong cast featured Roxane D'Orleans Juste, who had a delicate touch as the Moor's Wife, underplaying her innocence, as well as Raphael Boumaila as the Moor, Douglas as His Friend and Ryoko Kudo as His Friend's Wife.

Limon's great sensitivity and feeling for the messiness and tragedy of life had its roots in his impoverished upbringing in Mexico, where he also witnessed the bloodiness of the Mexican Revolution and the deaths of several younger siblings. The dance company he founded after settling in this country was the first ever sent out on a State Department tour, and it was on a second such tour in 1957-- to Europe, including war-ravaged Poland -- that Limon found the inspiration for "Missa Brevis."

"What I saw and felt as an artist and as a human being is probably the most complex and devastating experience of my life," he wrote after that trip. Against a background of cities "eviscerated by the savagery of war," he found people whose optimism and willingness to rebuild and carry on stunned him. The new dance, a full-company work created the next year, paid tribute to the human spirit. It was accompanied by Zoltan Kodaly's "Missa Brevis in Tempore Belli," a work the Hungarian wrote just after World War II. With Hamrick on organ and the fine voices of the University of Maryland Concert Choir, it was uncorked with all appropriate poignancy and zeal.

The company has recently revived this work, and one senses more depth will come with more performances. The cast was expanded with guests, and this lent a bit of unevenness, but more than that, the emotional tone felt a tad flat. D'Orleans Juste, in the "Crucifixus" and other sections, was riveting, holding herself upright in a remote, Shakerlike way. This made the melting softness in her knees, in those moments when she sank to the stage, seem the very essence of a genuflection.