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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Bowen McCauley Dance/CityDance Ensemble

By Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
November 02, 2002

It takes guts to choreograph to Brahms; unabashed emotion does not suit our postmodern sensibilities. One can either surrender to the music’s grandeur, in the spirit of Isadora, or mock it. Lucy Bowen McCauley’s Rapture, which capped the shared program of Bowen McCauley Dance and the City Dance Ensemble at the Terrace Theater Wednesday night, does a bit of both.

McCauley has a sure command of structure, and, for the most part, this setting of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto for four women and two men, in McCauley’s smooth blend of ballet and modern dance is rich and satisfying. Skittery steps, slithers and swoons curl around the music like waves lapping at a pier. But at times, either because of the dancers’ overly bright expressions or because McCauley throws in a gag -- like rolling Alison Crosby across the backs of the other dancers like a mermaid in a 1930s musical -- the work is uneven in tone. Despite this, Rapture is a masterpiece compared to the drivel and drek served up by many ballet companies these days, and one wishes McCauley’s work was more widely known.

Crosby, with Olivier Muñoz, a fine dancer formerly with the now defunct Cleveland San Jose Ballet, seemed to inhabit different worlds in McCauley’s At Last. Crosby was all anxious, vulnerable emotion, Muñoz a study in impassive perfect placement.

In McCauley’s solo for herself, Tempered Beauty, she reveled in the pleasure of inhabiting her own body with the unselfconscious lack of narcissism of an animal stretching in the sun. Another solo, Matre’s Dance, a company premiere by McCauley performed by Robert Sidney, was an exhausting perpetuum mobile that might have had more impact with a stronger dancer.

Neither the dancers nor choreographers of the CityDance Ensemble are quite so accomplished as those of BMD, although Tara Pierson Dunning’s Endless Cycle, a duet for Amy Lifson and Vanessa Williamson, had some striking poses. Director Ralph Emerson’s Peregrine began strongly, with stillness and a sense of ritual, but eventually overstayed its welcome. His Our Separate Ways was an awfully pleasant look at men, women, war and death.