DANCE IMMERSION’S 2008 SHOWCASE
PRESENTATION OF THE CLEO PARKER DANCE ENSEMBLE
At the Enwave Theatre
May 29-31, 2008

One of the major dance companies in the world, the Cleo Parker Dance Ensemble from Denver, Colorado deserves a much bigger audience than it had on opening night—its first full ensemble presentation in Toronto. From start to finish, the company was sensational, luxuriating in exotic Afro-American, South American, and other hybrid choreographic influences while establishing its own brilliant, high velocity signature style. Actually, all the dancers (five males—one white, six females—one white, and almost all new to the company) have their distinctive body silhouettes, physical vocabularies, and modulations, but Ms. Parker’s formal boundaries ensure that these distinctions somehow become part of a harmonious whole. Ms. Parker, who has led her company for almost four decades, is not unduly concerned with smooth lines or neat symmetries. Her movement is all about angularities, volumes, and accelerated rhythms. It isn’t so much technique as cultural signs that dominate, though the technique is certainly wonderful. What most informs her choreography is passion—whether liturgical, ritualistic, or social. This passion issues, of course, from spirit—the dancer’s implicit belief that dance is really a visual expression of how the dancer responds to the world metaphysically, socially, musically, culturally.

   One of the principal aims of the ensemble is to celebrate, perpetuate, and pass on legacies. The opening choreographic prayer, My Bahia, was an example, especially as the brief piece (using Brazilian and African music) was created to honour Marceline Freeman who, for over thirty-five years, has been Cleo Parker’s student, dancer, rehearsal director, friend, and spirit sister. Having gone blind, Ms. Freeman is restricted in her choreography, but in an ironic way this physical limitation frees her spirit. She has become a cherished elder, and her connection to Afro-Brazilian culture and the whole idea of thanksgiving to Ancestors was celebrated in a very simple way. The piece led organically into Dance As Ritual, a new piece that used figures of the Elder, Priest, Initiates, and Serpent Deity in a composition marked by supple extensions, contortions, swirls, and half-strides, half-stomps to traditional African drumming. Tall, long limbed Damien Patterson as the Priest was thoroughly absorbed in the rite, becoming a drum himself by manner of his vibrating body.

   Further evidence of cultural legacy was had in Progressions Based On Dunham Technique (2008), commemorating Katherine Dunham’s embrace of Caribbean cultures and her transmission of their legacies to young dancers, and in Raindance, a signature piece that premiered in 1984, that has an elemental simplicity of form that is utterly compelling, and in Escapades, originally choreographed by Alvin Ailey in 1993 and re-staged by Christopher Huggins two years ago. Progressions gave the male dancers a superbly dynamic forum. It had beautiful variations in thrilling swirls of colour and accelerated tempi. Even the dominant twitchings were a thing of virtuosity, offering segments of the body their separate exercises, yet unifying the entire torso and the limbs as an expression of the spirit of “My Africa,” a famous poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The entire ensemble shone, but of particular note were Cedric Hall and Laurel Richardson.

   Escapades was set to the jazz of Max Roach, and it nicely integrated ritual patterns, arabesques, ports de bras, jazz movement and classic ballet. There were elegant duets, marvelously colourful riffs (becoming progressively hotter and swifter), and the piece, though not one of Ailey’s narrative ones, showed how his choreography had significant breadth. The Cleo Parker dancers triumphed in it, as, indeed, they did in Ragtime, a section from Treemonisha, an opera composed by Scott Joplin, and in which the men entered in spats and suspenders, holding chairs and developing their own personal relationships to the music. The women were costumed in bright tones (quite a contrast to the dominant white of early pieces), and the expert jauntiness made for real show dancing—the type that would easily light up a Broadway stage.

 
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