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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Ailey Troupe's Light Fantastic

Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
May 18, 2001; Page C6

In a time when dance is usually either stripped to the bone or laden with gimmicks, it's a treat to see a work in which design is integral. Judith Jamison's "Double Exposure," made last year for the Lincoln Center Festival and which the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performed Wednesday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House, uses film and color as a partner to the choreography.

Two huge screens, often bordered in vibrant colors, dominate the stagescape. Dancers carry hand-held cameras, and occasionally an image from the dance flashes behind them. At other times, the projections are of shapes, mostly watery, or of a checkerboard whose squares pulsate with rapidly changing color images. (The program creditsa New York company called Art in Commerce and several of its principals for "media concept and creation.")

The title is suggested in the costumes (by Emilio Sosa) as well. Matthew Rushing, as the central man, and Glenn A. Sims as his alter ego, begin the dance in black and white; three female soloists (Dwana Adiaha Smallwood, Bahiyah Sayyed and Asha Thomas) are in bright-colored dresses.

Jamison's choreography is in the company's present Lean Mean Dancing Machine style, and the dancers are invincible. There's nothing they can't do. They turn like gyroscopes, and handle centered and non-centered movement with equal aplomb. Legs float to the sky in effortless extensions. Shimmies start in the shoulders and ripple through the body to erupt in the hips, and the legs seem to giggle with the pleasure of it.

"Double Exposure" is intimate yet distant. Rushing and Sims confront and comfort each other. The projections occasionally catch a face, twisted with emotion, yet none of that emotion quite registers off-screen.

After the men's big pas de deux, the color symbolism changes -- the women come back one by one, wearing black now, and dancing as individuals or as the men's partners rather than a chorus of Fates or Furies. When the men return, they are in bright colors -- cool hues of blue-green and green-blue. This is visually very neat, but there's no resolution or meaning -- and the dance has given every cue that one was intended.

Ronald K. Brown's "Grace" (1999) aims at meaning -- faith and grace, and the journey through life -- but the choreography seems strangely at odds with the concept. The jerky, highly energetic movement, an uneasy blend of modern and African dance, fights the smooth and graceful score, a collage of songs by Duke Ellington, Paul Johnson, Roy Davis Jr. and Fela Kuti.

Alvin Ailey's jazzy, mellow "Phases" (1980), which opened the program, is a simple, clearly structured work that has no deeper aim than to celebrate dancing and dancers. Its large cast was, if not quite transported by its spirit, respectful of it.