Artists emergent and urgent

Nice, nice show at Dance Theater Workshop last night--Emerging Artists. Very strong showing from Camille A. Brown who...listen, doesn't she, by now, make you begin to look sideways at that word, emerging? In her new Matchstick, set to piano music composed and performed by Brandon McCune, she creates a physical and emotional environment in which four Black men in post-Civil War/pre-civil rights America--future leaders of a community--gather around a table strewn with papers to strategize, argue and perhaps resolve differences. Their movement--expressionist and often jarring--gives us a sense of their conflicts and their vital connection to one another. It was a joy to see Kevin Guy, Otis Donovan Herring, Juel D. Lane and Keon Thoulouis dancing at DTW, giving their all to this intriguing and powerful piece. Later, Brown told me that, although this was a world premiere performance, she's still developing Matchstick and has plans to expand it. Good!

Sydney Skybetter. Oh, wow. If he's still "emerging," will someone please light the fuse and blast him out there? Some better-known choreographers working a similar aesthetic vein get high praise for their musicality whether their work indeed has true musicality or much else to recommend it. This man actually deserves the kudos he's received. And the clarity of execution in his poetic, sophisticated craftsmanship, married with contained passion, makes him a standout. There's never a dull moment in Potemkin Piece (2007) or The Cold House You Kept (2008). And you must see Bergen Wheeler who appears in all three Skybetter pieces on the program but solos in an extravagant excerpt from The Personal (2008), dancing around a pliable axis of beauty. She's a dancer's dancer, an extraordinary instrument with star quality.

Jessy Smith's pop-culture -loving, all-female troupe, POW! offered refreshing retro with a chik-a-boom kick in Pow! And The Bedazzlers, The Gimme Muney Hunnies and, especially, Let's Get Tangled. That last one, which closed out the program, managed to hold its own against the potentially-upstaging song it's danced to--Outkast and Janelle Monae's hilariously-delivered, if hair-raising, Call the Law. Jacob Peter Kovner and Anna K. Whaley premiered Adjacent People and Other Problems. Its elusive subtlety made it a little recessive in the company of all these heavy hitters, and I might not relish long dances set to music that lulls me. But there's something about Kovner and Whaley's sensibilities that can't be easily dismissed. I'd like to see more.

Catch the final night of Emerging Artists at DTW by clicking here.