DANCE

Choreographers' Showcase

A word of caution to students planning to pursue modern dance in college: There's a good chance you'll soon be rolling around the floor for an aspiring choreographer. Such was the artistic fate of many young dancers Saturday in College Park, when the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center hosted the 25th Annual Choreographers' Showcase.

Carolyn Tate first organized the showcase for Prince George's Publick Playhouse in 1982. The event moved to the Smith Center in 2002, where it continues to draw a mix of university dance troupes and regional collaborators. Adjudicators Jeanine Durning, a New York-based choreographer, and Charles O. Anderson, a dance professor at Muhlenberg College, chose seven pieces (out of 60-some submissions) for the 2008 program.

Three deserve a life beyond the showcase, especially the cleverly titled "The Hunt of the Gatherers" by Kutia Jawara. A former member of Washington Reflections Dance Company, Jawara created a three-movement work that elegantly fused West African dance, balletic technique and gymnastic movement. Her dancers, seven statuesque young women, were by far the most talented at the showcase.

Three pieces amounted to variations on a tiresome theme: tense, sexually ambiguous female relationships. Props (and ice packs) to the hardy student dancers who crashed to the floor in all three.

A fourth problematic work was original to the program but not to Washington: Local choreographer Daniel Burkholder presented a multimedia work-in-progress intent on probing "our complex relationships to water." Fans of Liz Lerman's Takoma Park studio know dance and science can be artfully combined, but in lesser hands, the concept was reduced to a gimmick, cool fishnet costumes and a bunch of people flailing their arms.

The showcase opened and ended with its most intriguing works. In "Persona," choreographer Carol Hess and solo performer Jenifer Dobbins used a change of clothes and a camera hidden in a briefcase to pose questions for contemporary career women. The program closed with a May-December pas de deux for septuagenarian choreographer Frances Wessells and her much younger partner, Robbie Kinter. Their duet left the audiences with a half smile and whole lot to ponder, as any choreographers' showcase should.

-- Rebecca J. Ritzel

Hip-Hop Festival at Dance Place

This year's annual hip-hop festival at Dance Place was a whole lot better than some of the previous ones. With a single exception, the hip-hop numbers were well choreographed, and the high-energy dancing was marvelously taut and chiseled. The artists and groups were diverse, but there were two common themes: hip-hop can be a positive social force (such as helping kids by involving them in dance), and commercial hip-hop too often glorifies money, violence and "bling."

Local artist Aysha Upchurch's smart poem criticized hip-hop rhymes devoid of substance. She chastised rapper 50 Cent because "your two quarters are an embarrassment to the dollar. . . . I always expect more bang for my buck, but I always end up shortchanged." Local dancer Reggie Glass also delivered an entertaining, albeit didactic, rant against "minds trapped in mental cages," and Jennifer Archibald successfully melded hip-hop with modern dance.

But the two large dance collectives, Live in Color Dance Collective and D.C.-based Culture Shock, were what electrified the evening. Both were punchy and hot. Hats off to LICDC's Zedric Bembry for his machine-gun-like choreography; it featured the rapid-fire delivery of many short routines. The dancers never ran out of choreographic ammunition.

When a program is this engaging, mediocrity really stands out. That was the unfortunate case with Urban Impact, the Joy of Motion Dance Center's teen hip-hop performance company, a student-level group that clearly didn't belong on this outstanding program.

-- Pamela Squires