Duncan and Denishawn Revisited

...But the concerts at New York's Roundabout Theater by Annabelle Gamson and by the Joyce Trisler Danscompany revealed, in addition to a buried and important historical period, a startling—and inspiriting—approach to dance...

...Just as, during the first 30 years of this century, Duncan pushed impatiently past what she felt to be the fetters of classical ballet, and the team of St...

...Especially intriguing was the difference in the weight and thrust of identical steps danced identically by men and women...

...A bare-legged woman darting across the stage, her gesture so expansive it seems to draw the empty space in about her until she herself is larger than life . . . Children fluttering before a tinkling musical storm and skipping sedately through a dream of ancient Greece . . . The year 1976 will prove memorable for presenting such scenes and bringing back to us, in some measure, three of the pioneers of modern dance: Isadora Duncan, Ruth St...

...And despite some silly moments in Pinska's "Dance in Space," wide-eyed little Anne-Marie Hackett's manipulation of a long cerise silk scarf, her head and limbs echoing its path through air, showed the pure dance uses St...

...A slow walk, abstracted cradling, beckoning and reaching out, all performed in one corner of the stage, seemed to presage the dance minimalists of the last decade...

...Interlaced with charming excerpts from critic Walter Terry's taped interviews with St...

...Denis and Shawn looked beyond the classics to the exoticisms of ethnic dance forms, so their descen-dents tended to regard those early impulses as blousy legend-making and kitsch...

...s J hawn's "Bach" (set to the composer's Two-Part Invention Number Four), had groups of three women and three men move alternately through a beat-for-beat transformation of the music into waltz turns and triplet runs, and then dance in canon...

...Gamson, who stresses she was not attempting to recreate the personnae of Duncan and Wigman in her concerts, brought a new witiness to their dances...

...Watching this somber and elemental solo, one recalled, too, that Isadora's children died in 1913 in a freak accident...

...Denis' "Liebestraum" embodied the fullness of Liszt's passionate ode to love in unadorned runs, walks and spins...

...Denis' and Doris Humphrey's music visualization of a Schumann piano score...

...set to a score by Scriabin...

...Indeed, there was far more to Isadora than the legends...

...Occasionally the arms hang loosely at the sides...

...It is all surprisingly elusive, but the famous Duncan abandonment to music and sensibility was achieved with great control...

...Duncan works are marked by pared-down movement: runs and skips in cross-stage diagonals or circles, feet coming into resilient contact with the floor rather than springing up and over it in big leaps...

...That is probably just as well...

...Inspired by the dancer's experiences in the USSR, the strides upstage and back, stamping, crossed wrists and falls to the knees evoking bondage, and the tight defiant fists gave the impression of a Soviet revolutionary poster come to life...

...But both Danscompany and Gam-son offer a special, invigorating immediacy...

...True, the point of reference remained the ground...

...Also on the bill were several of Gamson's own intelligent, resonant solos and—a new venture—the reconstruction of two dances by Mary Wigman, a seminal German Expressionist choreographer...

...At other times the arms are extended in votive supplication, curving up like those of a figure on a Grecian vase, or are thrust down in despair or fury...

...There are characteristic small jumps, one leg raised and bent down at the knee, the head and torso thrown back in ecstasy or curled forward in a kind of regenerative push into space...

...Three solos were, in fact, rather stark...

...One left Gam-son's program, which was more emphatic than her recent studio offerings of Duncan, convinced that Isadora really did create a dance by letting music fill her emotionally...

...Equally revealing, and presented here for the first time as well, was the 1921 "Mother...

...Her dances suggest a certain artistic courage...

...But the hands fluttered and frothed for punctuation...

...Denis' crowded Babylonian ballet...

...Their exploration of the billowing, rippling properties of an enormous swatch of blue silk was breathtaking and sensually liberating in its simplicity...

...Gamson's earliest training was in Duncan dance—under Julia Levien, a member of Duncan's company?a style she has returned to periodically...

...A small, gutsy woman in her mid-40s, she looked as little like the great innovator as could be imagined when she matter-of factly walked onto the Roundabout stage, her head tilted a little forward...

...For the most part these efforts have seemed unduly solemn or diluted by very different current choreographic preoccupations...

...The two projects appear to be ongoing ones, and—who knows?—Duncan and the Denishawners might thus once more clear the air...

...Until about five years ago, modern dance did not look kindly upon its beginnings...

...the soil was moist and warm with summer and over its surface birds dipped and indolent dreams were spun...

...a powerful performance by Nancy Colahan, herself a youngster, managed almost subliminally to suggest lost youth...

...Because Dans-company's funding for this first, tentative venture was meager, it could not put on any of the extravagant production numbers that made Denishawn a standby on the vaudeville circuit...

...As it happens, the Trisler dancers are, for the most part, newly professional or of an advanced student level, and therefore ironically approximate the less developed technical level of the first Denishawn troupe...

...The Duncan section of the program closed with the rousing 1922 Scriabin "Etude...

...in between the freestanding arcs described by arms and legs pulled away from the earth and returned there, and forearms seemed to push against the air...

...Today we are used to sparer stuff, and the exceptional honesty and conviction of these young dancers would be difficult to uphold in works like "Ishtar," St...

...Denis and Ted Shawn...

...when the body and draped tunic are still, the dancer takes on the intended look of classical Greek statuary...

...Of late, however, there has been a new interest in working back to roots...

...The wonder is that her vitality is transmittable...

...Denis) freely admitted that her knowledge of the arts of the Orient and Mideast came from encyclopedias, travelogues and even an advertisement for Egyptian Deities cigarettes, so it is not surprising that the opening ethnic "techniques" portion of the program looked less than authentic...

...In its place, though, there was an abundance of spiritual as well as physical innocence and grace...

...Pastoral" and "Dance of Summer" each began and ended with a nearly motionless reclining body...

...Since Duncan's American appearances were comparatively infrequent, Gamson's presentation of the work at the Roundabout actually was its New York premiere, and its physical bravado was a revelation...

...If these sustained, fluid, natural movements look stripped of detail today, they must have seemed even more so in the days when extravagant "Russian" ballet, much of it received second hand, was the only dance available on this side of the Atlantic...

...Denis and Shawn, the evening paid a loving and well-deserved tribute to the tempestuous and capricious careers of the two choreographer-dancers...

...Still, the dances immediately following demonstrated that those techniques have had the effect of freeing performers for the simple rendering of music?its structure, rhythm and timbre?into movement closely patterned on the score: as Miss Ruth described it, "music visualization...

...One, Shawn's "Gnosienne," set to Satie, was an evocation of Cretan bas reliefs danced by Ralph Farrington in profile, stiff-necked and exotic, and with a feline intensity...

...They had not been performed here previously and in the context of Wigman's dark, bare, earth-bound style, they proved most surprising...

...Danscompany's late-November, early-December engagement at the Roundabout, "The Spirit of Denishawn," was a labor of love by Trisler and Klar-na Pinska, now in her 70s and one of the last surviving Denishawners...

...Miss Ruth" (St...

...The final piece was "Soaring," St...

...Then pianist James Gemmell began playing and the performance sketches of Duncan—the best representations of her dances that remain—came eerily to life...

...Interestingly, choreographer Michel Fokine, a Russian balletic innovator of the time himself, was said to have been considerably influenced by her 1905 "Valse Bril-lante," a nonstop glittering cascade of movement set to a Chopin waltz...

...The piece was ingeniously animated by the rippling Cecile Chaminade piano composition...

...The "Orientalia" segment that closed the program was composed primarily of solos...

...Denis and Shawn...

...For, more than anything else, Duncan's work is informed by music...

...Something about the directness of these pioneers soars beyond our current preoccupation with streamlined technical bravura...

...Wit appears to have been in relatively short supply at Denishawn, the school and company founded by St...

...Both were slivers from a 1929 suite called "Shifting Landscape," both were set to dry, delicate little percussion scores by Will Goetze, and both were remarkable...

...Denis' great interest in stagecraft could be put to...