Boom Town

DanceBoom!'s back, looking like a permanent cultural fixture. Opening night came complete with lights flooding the Wilma façade, appropriate remarks from City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown and a fancy post-performance buffet in the lobby. The Wilma and especially Nick Stuccio, Boom's curator, never seem to make obvious choices. His experiment: lead off a series celebrating experimental dance with a glossy showcase of performers rooted in tradition.

LaVaughn Robinson, Philly's tap genius and great man of dance, started things off on the right foot, tapping away in a faux café setting with his longtime protege and dancing partner Germaine Ingram, along with three fine jazz musicians. There was a lot of chatter intended to make the performance seem like the spontaneous work of the tappers and the musicians, but if that sometimes felt strained, there was nothing artificial about watching Robinson, 75, still making music with his taps. This fabulous performer/teacher provided a living link between new young dance innovators and their local roots, back to a time when tap was the hot street dance, not hip-hop. Robinson's often said that his feet are his instrument, and neither he nor Ingram hit a sour note.

Robinson's jazz club gave way to the shifting silks and tinkling ankle bells of Indian temple dance with NATYA, a small troupe of classical Indian dancers. Since every gesture of hand, foot and head tells part of a story, Westerners who don't know the body language, which means most of us, often sit through these dances admiringly but mystified. But Shoba Sharma, NATYA founder, turned out to be an innovator herself, bringing her audience into the performance with a brief prologue to each dance where she told the story and used the gestures of the dance to come. So, in "Nandichol" we knew which dancer was Shiva and something of why he turned blue, and how the love of Krishna was at the center of Sharma's solo, "Asthtapadi," and we really felt some of the poetry and mystery of the form.

Filling out this eclectic program was Pasión Y Arte, a flamenco troupe of women with a difference. At Fringe these ladies brought the house down doing traditional stuff in front of video of a car wreck. For Boom, the eight dancers created the hint of a club setting of their own. The curtain rose on black-clad musicians, whose silhouetted forms provided the background to the ladies draped across chairs set diagonally across the stage. In slinky white gowns, they looked like dream figures, but nothing could have been more real than the stomping, wailing and just plain attitude of their dancing. Heck, they even pounded out some flamenco steps while they were sitting down. The dancers brought along two marvelous guests, singer Antonio de Jerez and dancer La Meira, both adding high luster to the proceedings. If any link was needed between these three apparently disparate forms, all you had to do was listen -- in each piece, the feet spoke. Presenting traditional dance not as a survival or revival but as something of this very moment is pretty darned innovative!

Leah Stein Dance Company and Kulu Mele African American Dance Ensemble

The double bill of Leah Stein Dance Company and Kulu Mele African American Dance Ensemble offers striking contrasts as well as some subtle similarities. Stein calls on the intellect via finely crafted environmental works while Kulu Mele digs into ritual-based idioms that highlight the human spirit. And if the former is very much a head exercise while the latter hits up heart and soul, both acts accentuate rhythms of music and movement to ignite the senses. Stein, best known for outdoor site-specific works, here uses The Wilma Theater as her landscape. Through Lines (of Intimate Distance) begins in darkness with company members standing in the aisles blowing plastic tubes, making noises evocative of a forest filled with insects at nighttime. Next they pound on the Wilma's walls, instilling thoughts of creatures stirring. The surround-sound motif effectively draws the audience into the work, which moves to the stage as the lights go up. The ensuing non-narrative scenarios, done to musical accompaniment by David Forlano and David Champion -- who employ an array of instruments including accordion, trombone and everyday objects -- are built on Stein's trademark contact-based fluid gestures. Linear entrances, couplings and exits where dancers connect and then either move in sync for a brief period or quickly break apart, play in tune to the music, which waxes and wanes in volume, emanating from various points in the theater. Occasional shadowy figures passing behind a scrim add a surreal quality to Through Lines' underlying themes of proximity and distance.

The high-concept atmosphere comes down to earth with Kulu Mele's performance, which is steeped in ancestral tradition. As a drum battery beats out syncopated rhythms, a seven-member female cast, dressed in colorful printed garb, do ceremonial dances from West Africa. In Yankadi, the Kulu women sway their arms, swivel their hips and stomp their feet for a buoyant display of friendly flirtation. With Yololi, a dance that celebrates a baby's birth, the women carry calabash -- bowls rimmed with shells that make rustling sounds when shaken. And a whole lotta shakin' goes on, not only of the calabash, but also the women, who, as an ensemble and then individually, whip their bodies into a swirling frenzy. Combined with the pounding drum corps, Kulu Mele's exuberance proved contagious, prompting many audience members to clap and sing along.

Merián Soto and Nichole Canuso

Two women, each working in a highly individual way, one at a rich, mature point in her work and the other an emerging dance creator, show up on the same DanceBoom! bill. Both feel free to make a story out of dance, and if one chooses to do this in a meditative solo, and the other in a romp with 11 other dancers, well, it balances out wonderfully.

Merián Soto, a much-honored choreographer, brings the richness of her Latino cultural background to Prequel(a): Deconstruction of a Passion for Salsa. This is a memory dance. Soto's as much indebted to creative exploration of sense memory, say, by Proust, as to any modern dance or Latino innovator. Soto starts this very personal solo exploration of her love of salsa, lying on the stage listening to old LP records playing Latino music. She's a young girl dreaming and beginning to move, then she rises and starts to really dance, segueing into a grown woman using salsa moves to express physical joy and freedom.

In Soto's extraordinary finale, she actually embraces the entire salsa experience in her body, using her voice, her feet and hands, singing, stomping and clapping. Deconstructing herself into pure salsa, she's the dancer, the music, the beat and totally amazing -- the effect really has to be seen to be believed.

"The Royal We" is Nichole Canuso's riff on an Italian fairy tale, in which a prince must find a bride. The royal parents are firm about this, and there is no lack of nuptial candidates. But the prince, danced by Peter D'Orsaneo, eludes the princesses literally, running repeatedly across the stage with the would-be consorts in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, a lovely simple girl (Canuso) has been transformed into a horn by magical beings. Suffice to say, the prince sees the girl behind the horn although no one else can, and marries the horn in a deliciously ridiculous ceremony.

Canuso proves very deft at creating a wry, even subtle, dance that doesn't swamp the folktale. As a member of both Headlong Dance and MOXIE, she's well-grounded in the theater of the absurd school of modern dance. An early version of "We" previewed at Fringe, where Canuso emphasized the slapstick of the chase scene. Now she's shaped the piece with magical transformations at beginning and end -- and who better to win the prince than the choreographer herself.

olive: Hip-Hop Dance Theatre and Koresh Dance Company

Red alert: Persons eager to catch rising stars in the local dance community, call The Wilma Theater pronto, and reserve tickets for the DanceBoom! show featuring olive: Hip-Hop Dance Theatre. Olive's Saturday-night performance for the series sold out (no doubt due in part to the popularity of the other half of the bill, Koresh Dance Company) and there's a good buzz brewing based on the budding ensemble's performance.

As its name suggests, olive does hip-hop, but company co-founders Raphael Xavier and Jamie Merwin stray far from street dance. Olive's entry for the evening, tOy bOx, seamlessly stitches together movement, video, music, lighting and set design. Xavier and Merwin, dressed alike in hats, vests and knickers, one in red and the other in green, call to mind leprechauns, or young children from another period. The two dance separately, each framed by a rectangular spotlight. On the surface, their actions come off like a couple of guys just trying things out for size. But they're actually doing very studied breakdowns of simple phrases of breakdance. At times they move so slowly it's akin to stop-animation (the sheer muscle control required to pull this off is astonishing). Subdued lighting coupled with live avant jazz (sort of), plus a video screening images form a fanciful atmosphere. Artful and mesmerizing, tOy bOx transforms a bravado dance style into an introspective meditation.

Sharing the bill is Koresh, one of the city's better-known dance troupes. Their performance included Urban Crisis, a world premiere by artistic director Ronen Koresh, inspired by growing paranoia in America after 9/11. Similar to other works of the company, it features an industrial techno score and scenes of violence followed by a call for redemption, all presented in a somewhat literal yet very dancy format. The bigger event here is Koresh's performance of Living in East Podunk, choreographed by Donald Byrd. This satirical piece is inspired by the idea that most people think nothing much happens in small towns, but venture beneath the surface and ooh la la. Byrd shows us all kinds of happenings -- some are playful, others are sexual with a hint of transgression. The movement, merging modern, pedestrian and folk genres, is frequently fractured and a bit off-balance, which not only keeps things on edge, but also pushes the physical prowess of the corps.