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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Wise Beyond His Years

By Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
October 7, 2002

Paul Taylor was quoted recently as saying, “I don’t know what modern dance is anymore.” His confusion is understandable. Contemporary modern dance’s uneasy marriage with ballet’s virtuosity and MTV’s funky moves is enough to have the Founding Mothers contracting in their graves.

Taylor might have been heartened to see Dana Tai Soon Burgess’s Moving Forward Dance Company celebrate its tenth anniversary Saturday night at D.C.’s newly regilted Lincoln Theatre. The five dances on the program, all by Burgess, breathe gentle, insistent life into the art form. From the pleasant opening “Cour du Coeur,” a flirtation for two courtier couples in different permutations, to the powerful, closing “Mandala”, in which four women seek spiritual fulfillment like some New Age temple dancers, Burgess choreographs with a sure hand and astonishing artistic confidence for someone still young. There are choreographers well into their 50s who don’t have as consistent and individual a voice as Burgess has found at 33.

Each dance is spare, intimate and perfect as a pearl. Burgess’s work is food for the eye and the soul: the music, often specially composed, and the design are as much a part of the dance as the steps. Each dance has its own language, usually a mixture of Western modern dance and various Eastern dance forms, from the Indonesian dance of the hands to chops and kicks from the martial arts. Burgess selects a few movements that suit each dance from a broad palette the way a painter might choose a handful of complementary hues, so each dance looks distinct, yet bears the imprint of the choreographer’s silken, fluid style.

The evening’s premiere (optimistically dated 2003) was “Leaving Pusan,” a dance that’s specifically about an immigrant’s inner turmoil when leaving one culture for another, but can also be seen as a metaphor of the plight of the outsider. Miyaka Nitadori, in white robes, wearing a white ceremonial mask and carrying a round, white travel bag, is ignored by five black-clad dancers who move in unison, as precise as a piston engine. Nitadori packs and unpacks the robe, but she’s just as uncomfortable in the short, red Western dress the robe has concealed. She doesn’t fit in where she is; she knows she won’t where she’s going. There’s a man--her culture, judging her, or past or future lover?; Burgess’s dances are as concrete as short stories and as amorphous as dreams--who seems at times sympathetic, at times reproachful, at times merely a member of the pack.

There’s not a single break in “Fractures,” a trio made in 2000, that chronicles the ebb and flow of attraction and rejection. Watching it is like hearing a tenor sing an aria without once pausing for breath. Burgess, Nitadori, and Rachel Merga are caught in a triangle; they move as one even when apart, the man bobbing back and forth between the women like a buoy cut loose from its moorings.

In “The Supplicant” a 1997 solo revised in 1999 as a duet for two women (Jennifer Rain Ferguson and the boneless, weightless Sarah Craft), two penitents seek comfort from each other and a shaft of light from above. It was daring to program this immediately before “Mandala,” as the two dances share a similar subject, but the movement in each is different. Burgess uses the floor as the early moderns did -- not because it’s there, but because it’s a metaphor for the earth. In “Mandala,” the dancers press into the floor as if to conquer it; in “The Supplicant,” they sink into it as if into a grave. When they are airborne, it’s not to defy gravity, but to ignore it as an unnecessary distraction.

If this is the future, bring it on.