It only takes watching one performance to see why the Garth Fagan Dance company is at the forefront of originality and innovation in the world of modern dance. The Garth Fagan Dance company dazzled a large and hugely appreciative audience Saturday night with their graceful leaps, fast blurring spins and intricate arm movements.
Since Fagan formed his company in 1970 in Rochester, New York, he has continued to develop his own dance technique and contribute to the advancement and progress of dance as a living and changing art form.
Combining aspects of Afro-Carribean dance, the speed and grace of ballet and the experimentation and new energy of the post-moderns, Fagan's dance encompasses a wide variety of cultures, rhythms and movements in its style.
The first dance number, intended as an introduction to Fagan technique, exhibits such a variety of culture, with elements of jazz, African and Carribean music expressed on stage with flexible positioning, an emphasis on balance and precision and varying polyrhythms, beating one on top of the other, throughout the dance.
"Touring Jubilee 1924" was a completely different twist on dance, only demonstrating the versatile artistic capabilities of the dancers. This was a fun, upbeat, jazzy dance number, truly reminiscent of the big boom of the 1920s and of such popular tunes as "The Charleston." Intended as a comedic dance number, the company succeeded in making the audience laugh and feel a sense of the lighthearted, flirtatious fun of the Twenties.
Yet Fagan's dancers showed they are capable of portraying deeper, serious meaning as well with the dance number "Nkanyit," meaning, "all encompassing respect for life, elders and each other, instilled early in childhood."
The piece is divided into sections: "There," "Here," "Family," and "Tomorrow." Fagan's newest work, "Nkanyit" takes the audience through the roots of the past, the traditional family unit of the present and their coexistence in "Tomorrow."
"Sometimes we misplace what it means to know our ancestry," said Valentina Alexander, member of the company since 1980. One of the greater meanings behind the dance is an identity search and realization. Eventually the past and the present must exist together in one unified identity.
"None of us stay in one place. We're searching, discovering, growing from where we are," Alexander said. This existing transition between ancestry and the future was portrayed on stage with a group of dancers having elements of both past and modern, in their costume as well as their dance.
Along with this representation of transition danced the persistent past and present -- a group with traditional African dress and movement, and a contemporary family unit in modern dress, embracing innovative movement and rhythm, but inevitably reminiscent of the past as well.
Another dance number layered and enriched with meaning and significance is one entitled "Shackles." The dancers swayed closed to one another in a line, seemingly attached. At intervals they would separate and perform more intricate, freer movements.
Reflecting the African heritage of many of the dancers, the dance manifests the restriction of slavery and the desire to break free. On a wider, more encompassing scale, the dance reflects the constricting boundaries of every day life, and a desire to leap out of a synchronized group and perform one's own dance.
Much to the surprise of the audience, the Garth Fagan Dance Company was once called "Bottom of the Bucket." Yet in a sense, this name, like their dance, has deeper significance. They started their company not for the glory and public images of dance, but to express themselves genuinely through art.
In the words of dancer Natalie Rogers, a dancer's goal is to make "movement in its purest form. "The true artist is very giving," she said.
Far from the bottom, the dancers of the Garth Fagan Dance Company do indeed have a true and genuine understanding of what art is and how to give it to other people.
