Motion? Yes. Mavericks? Uh...

By the end of last year's presidential campaign, the perfectly blameless word maverick was left standing around in shredded underwear, a glazed look in its eye, nobody willing to give it the time of day. And I'm thinking that dance fans might do well to be skeptical once again whenever they see that word used to characterize and promote dancemakers. I'm thinking that, particularly, after a respectable, pleasant but not earthshaking hour at La MaMa Moves festival which sampled the work of several choreographers designated as "Mavericks in Motion."

In motion, they certainly were. But there were only a couple of moments that made me sit forward, and they belonged to Bergen Wheeler (dancing in Sydney Skybetter's The Personal and in her own Lone) and Kim Jones (partnered by Edgar Cortes in Cortes's Lagri Mar).

Jones and the Portuguese-born Cortes both hail from Graham backgrounds, and the romantic Lagri Mar gives them plenty of Graham-like archetypal gravitas and glamour to chew on. And Jones gives herself over to glamorous dancing like nobody's business.

Wheeler's the dark-haired, compact, incredibly supple dynamo who regularly takes Skybetter choreography--a striking combination of angularity and flow--to stratospheric levels because she's got not only exacting skill and focus but undeniable star quality. Bringing up the rear in Skybetter's Schubert suite of four solos, she is literally a precise, perfect art song in motion. Then, without much of a pause, Wheeler returns to launch a two-part solo of her own creation. Lone's first segment--set to Verdi's "Chi il Bel Sogno Di Doretta"--actually rocks steadier than her rocking out to Led Zeppelin's "Ramble On" but, at the end, her audience rightly greets her like the rock star she is.

There's still more La MaMa moving to see, from tonight at 8pm through Sunday at 8pm. If you're lucky, you'll catch Bergen Wheeler on Sunday night's program. Also, the "American Hybrids" program, running through Sunday looks fresh, promising, even potentially mavericky, with works by Monstah Black and Nicholas Leichter, Minneapolis's HIJACK/Kristen Van Loon and Arwen Wilder, and Bessie-Award winner Tom Pearson. And generations of Cunningham dance artists will take the stage from May 29-31.

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