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.

Company and schedule details and ticketing

Box office: 212-475-7710

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.