Dana Tai Soon Burgess, Finding Light in Darkness

Dana Tai Soon Burgess's best works slip unbound through time and place, navigating worlds of their own design. The shrouded, veiled dancer in "Khabet," to take one example from Friday's performance at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, looks like some living artifact from antiquity, wrapped and ready for death. Yet she shudders with postmodern angles and inner tumult. The sharp, weighted accent of her moves suggests contemporary intent, an unapologetic willfulness even at the moment of surrender.

Burgess's approach, in this and other works performed by Dana Tai Soon Burgess and Company, is one of subtlety and dreamlike ambiguity. The paradox is that his minimalist style feels complete. In lesser hands, the smudged edges and leisurely pace might prove maddening, but more often than not you're struck by quietly surprising truths in Burgess's works. It's all in the dancers' intricate specificity. Thank goodness he doesn't ask them to act. The way they move tells us just enough.

Burgess has been polishing his style for 15 years -- an impressive hunk of time for any modern dance company, and a milestone that he has marked with a new work, "Chino Latino," and with upcoming tours to New York and India. What's unusual, though, is that this latest concert is of a piece with his earlier output, which shared a similar mindful and patient unfolding. (One thinks back, for instance, to "Helix" of 1998, a mysterious and engrossing vision of creation.) Where's the evidence of the market research that so many other artists seem to be guided by, the polls that show audiences want to see skin and hear pop tunes? Such stubborn nonconformity!

Burgess has stuck to his own lonesome path. He hasn't undergone any artistic changes as his troupe has grown, and he has taken the rare step for a local choreographer of moving beyond the region to tour internationally -- recently, on State Department jaunts to Egypt, Israel and the West Bank. The latest sign of his upward momentum: This weekend's performances opened the Kennedy Center's contemporary dance season, the first time his troupe has been presented as part of the center's dance subscription series.

Burgess knows that darkness can be enlightening, even heartening, rather than merely depressing. A distinct gloom hung over Friday's program, which was largely a sampler of works from the past several years. There was stylized melancholy in "Leaving Pusan," a section from "Tracings," inspired by Korean immigration -- including Burgess's family -- to America in the early 1900s. But there were also piercing precision and aching softness in Miyako Nitadori's portrayal of a woman on the edge of departure, wrestling with a riot of emotions and emerging in some hazy but recognizable territory between triumph and resignation.

Death ought to have been on the payroll; the ultimate step was present in three of the seven works, most notably in two parts of "Images From the Embers," a meditation on loss and continuance. Fracturing the complete work in this way wasn't entirely satisfying; the complicated narrative didn't gel in small bites. Still, one was affected by a disorienting mix of feelings, speaking to the timeless aftereffects of trauma.

Burgess uses a light touch with story; his works lean toward the abstract, but he brings in characters and situations to suggest some kind of internal growth. "Fractures" centers on the thunderbolt moment when a young woman learns how to hook a man, and the mesmerizing "Mandala" seemed to turn on the dawning of unshakable belief among a group of worshipers.

"Chino Latino," the new piece, went in a different direction, and it felt out of place. Like many of Burgess's works, it drew on his background; specifically, his youth in Santa Fe, where his nickname, as he writes in a program note, was "Chino," and he haunted the local salsa clubs.

The piece catalogues Asian influences in Latin American song, accompanied by tunes such as the Cuban "La China y La Rumba" and Peru's "Mi China Lola." There was a charmingly scratchy, vintage quality to the recordings, but his dancers looked ill at ease in what was essentially a suite of social dances. His dancers are skilled at bringing the elusive to life, and are more accustomed to a reticent delicacy than earthy sensuality.

As is Burgess himself. If there's an element missing from his impressive arsenal of the human experience, it's what's telegraphed in the shake of the hips. "Chino Latino" wanted to be anchored in a specific look and feel, recalling a certain time. But for Burgess, master of the indefinite, the concrete realm is perhaps the only unfamiliar territory.