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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Universities Offer 3 Majors and a Minor

Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
May 15, 2002; Page C11

A woman in a blood-red tunic tears across the stage, brandishing a red banner. She leaps, falls, rises again. Suddenly she staggers, as though shot, and sinks to the ground; a companion gently cradles her head. Another woman takes the banner and carries on. Wave after wave of red-clad dancers with heroic thighs fight and die for the Glorious Russian Revolution. It was 1921, when the 20th century was new and no idea was too big or too dangerous to dance. The great American modern dance pioneer, Isadora Duncan, freethinker and passionate socialist, created "Varshavianka" for her students so they could dance her ideals and make them their own.

Duncan's dance lived again Monday night on the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage. It was the first of four works presented, each by a different university dance department, as part of "A Century of Dance," one of the nightly free programs the center presents in the Millennium space -- this one to an overflow and very appreciative audience.

Duncan's rarely performed group dance was done by a group of able and committed students from Ball State University in Indiana. Duke University students offered an even rarer revival: a reconstruction of sections from Antony Tudor's 1934 ballet "The Planets."

Tudor is most known for his inward-looking psychological ballets that explore characters' motivations. But this early work is more classical and less internal: It is the planets that control the mortals' lives and emotions.

Duke danced two of the more gentle sections, "Venus" and "Neptune." The stylized movement with its Hellenic references recalled Balanchine's "Apollo," as did the fact that the dancers wore black-and-white rehearsal outfits rather than the costumes associated with the piece (dresses for the women, different colors for each movement). Set to the Gustav Holst work of the same name, it's a gorgeous ballet, beautifully staged and danced, and one longs to see the rest of it.

Jose Limon's 1964 work "A Choreographic Offering" is another rarely performed blockbuster. As staged by the University of the Arts School of Dance, it showed how powerful and moving unadorned modern dance technique can be, and how expressive.

Seeing the works of these titans was a wonderful history lesson. They worked in a time when audiences expected masterworks and artists strove to produce them. Unfortunately, when these students begin performing professionally, their daily fare will likely be the program's last work: David Parsons's "The Envelope" (Wichita State University) from 1986, a glib, mildly amusing squiggle of movement and sight gags that seemed even more trivial than usual in such august company.