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Alexandra Tomalonis
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DANCE
DTH AND TETLEY, THE SOUL OF BALLET

Alexandra Tomalonis
April 29, 1994; Page c3

It's fascinating to see the Dance Theatre of Harlem in a ballet by Glen Tetley. Tetley's blend of modern dance and ballet techniques was intended to infuse virtuosity with emotion; his ballets explore the soul and glorify the body. Yet other dancers in Tetley works often look sleek and soulless, like slinky, sexless robots, and the ballets seem little more than curiously titled technical exercises The four couples in Tetley's "Dialogues," which DTH danced Tuesday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House, couldn't look soulless if they tried. Without in any way slighting the work's technical challenges, they brought out its drama by simply being themselves, and their dancing gave it an earthiness and an edge that no other company could match.

The four troubled relationships depicted in "Dialogues" are in different states of disarray, but there's no specific "story" and the couples aren't characterized in the choreography. Instead, dancers leap and turn and hurl themselves at and away from each other, their actions and responses keyed to the emotions Tetley heard in Alberto Ginastera's dark, churning Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. All of the dancers were superb, but one remembers especially Christina Johnson's magnificently proud series of jumps, and Ronald Perry's dangerously quiet moment of longing and despair at the end of the Scherzo.

The pungent intensity of "Dialogues" was a welcome contrast to the mellow dancing in Arthur Mitchell's "Fete Noire," which opened the program. This Balanchinesque party ballet, with its military crispness and piquant foot work, was a wonderful company showcase in DTH's youth. Designed to display the dancers' elegance and classical breeding, there's enough snap and sizzle in the choreography to turn it into a firecracker of a ballet, but only Adam James's pirouettes in the final movement came close to lighting the fuse.

Michael Smuin's always explosive "A Song for Dead Warriors" completed the program. It's a spectacular, audience-pleasing work with all the depth and poetry of a made-for-TV movie. And why do such magnificent dancers have to surrender the stage to buffalo hides and an arrogant jeep?

[Author's Note, November 2003: newspaper critics do not write their own headlines]