sarma

The first thing you see in José Limón's powerful dance-drama, Emperor Jones (1956), is a throne that looks as if it has been hacked out of a thornbush, and sitting on it, slumped forward, a figure wearing a plumed tricorne and an ancient and elaborate military jacket with gold braid and epaulets. Dark men crouch around him pointing and whispering, then slide away into the shadows. When the man on the throne raises his head, hoists himself up, you notice that he is mad. As he stalks his little domain his body leans back, away from his striding legs, with an arrogance that is also fearful. Even the ground might betray him. For Jones is a tyrant, has set himself up as the ruler of a group of credulous islanders. He splays his fingers, rakes in air, as if his craving for power had become a habit instead of an appetite.

Enter the White Man - any white man, or all of them. He's seedy even in his clean white suit and hat. Shambling, slinking behind the crazed Jones, he has no straightness about him anywhere. Even his joints are deceitful; his arms, legs, head flip out in different directions like ribbons. He looks boneless, spineless, infinitely corrupt. Jones still has some dignity, but you can see that it was white men like this one who gave him the idea that the only thing worthwhile is to control others.

The ghosts that haunt him merge with the natives who, egged on by the White Man, are hunting him down. Bare chested black men lean and spring from behind three bushy totems. Limbs, heads appear and disappear; the movement at each totem is exactly like that at the other two. Are you (and Jones) seeing six men or three incredibly agile ones? Or the same two tripled by the shadowy light? The men become the writhing cargo of a slave ship, are sold at auction by the White Man, are chain gang victims feeling his lash. Jones is among them, young and defiant.

Limón makes these scenes from the past seethe up briefly from circles of leaping, rolling bodies, and then sink back into the darkness. The men, now almost naked, form a symmetrical moving totem figure. In the red light, they look like some huge and deadly Venus flytrap, opening and closing its petals. What might be part of an ancient African initiation rite is also the murder of Jones. While the craven White Man watches insolently, Jones's body is hastily decked in jacket and hat, hoisted up, throne and all. A figure of mockery, yet seeming in death the god he had pretended to be.

Until this New London revival, the roles of Jones and the White Man had been played, and played superbly, only by José Limón and Lucas Hoving. The American Dance Festival Repertory Company has cast Clay Taliaferro and Edward DeSoto in the parts, and they are fine in a different way. Taliaferro with his tall, strong body and gentle face makes Jones very much the noble savage turned demented by a corrupt civilization. He is as arrogant, but not as insane as Limón DeSoto projects a wonderfully sleazy, cowardly evil as the White Man; Hoving was able also to suggest a depraved elegance-a con man imitating a wealthy planter who had drunk too much rum for too long.

The revival of Doris Humphrey's With My Red Fires (1936) also takes up the theme of power that corrupts. The dance was conceived as the middle section of the trilogy that concluded with New Dance. It's a mysterious and stunning work. The first part is a fertility ritual, almost phallic in the way small phalanxes of women recurrently thrust their way into the space and then retreat, and also in the driving rhythms of the movement, the near-absence of curves, and the rigidly leaning bodies. The group seems to be searching for a couple whose actual mating will express something, maybe achieve something for the community. One couple is tested briefly in the ring of watchers, but nothing comes of it. Finally two other young people are found, pushed together, and, after a fiercely joyful dance-hymn, left alone. Yet from the way their bodies curve around each other, lean together, you can tell that they are fulfilling a more private ritual of love.

Without a break, the second section, subtitled Drama, begins. From behind a pillar the Matriarch emerges, peering into the shadows, beckoning with a lash of her long, long skirt. She's not, as you might have been led to expect, the goddess-ruler of some pre-Hellenic tribe; she's turn-of-the-century Boston and furious that her daughter has run off with an unsuitable man. A little window curtain flips out of the side of the pillar as if to reassure us of the domestic nature of the whole drama. She gets the girl in weeps enough to make her cry too. How odd! The stylized way her mouth opens and her fingers cup just beneath her eyes makes her look like a Greek mask of Tragedy. She thinks it's all settled and leads the girl to lie down with her, but the young man steals in and elopes with his betrothed.

When the Matriarch awakens, notices the girl is gone, she pushes the curtain away again and strides from her pillars. This signals a curious change. Not only does the subsequent action return to being public, large-scale, outdoors, but we seem to have left Boston entirely. The Matriarch is more than an irate mother; she is the vindictive and potent ruler of a society that wouldn't dream of questioning her authority. She stalks the stage, whipping her skirt out of the way, twisting her head from side to side like a predatory bird. The harsh tango rhythm in this section of the Wallingford Riegger music makes her dancing even more macabre. She climbs the pillar and summons the mob with furious gestures and rough, almost lewd grindings of her hips. The idea of anyone thwarting her will is driving her mad. At one point she marshals the group into a circle, with lines of two or three or four people spoking out from the center where she now stands. They run and crouch like bloodhounds in brief sprints and long freezes. Her exhorting gestures start and stop too; so does the music. It's a terrifying effect, as if of some great force being wound up by stages. The crowd brings in the runaway lovers, but she doesn't stay to see what happens to them. (How can you believe she's still no more than a mother whose daughter has done the wrong thing?) Her rage has made her come completely apart in a fit of rigid frenzy, of mindless shaking, of primitive fury no longer directed toward an object. She disappears, but she's given the command. The crowd rips into the two lovers; a squad of men efficiently tosses their limp bodies into the air, drags them to the foot of the long steps that cross the stage horizontally, and leaves. The lovers painfully rise and, holding each other, arch their faces and breasts hopefully up to the sky and the morning.

Although a gradually intensifying narrative and dramatic thread runs through With My Red Fires, Humphrey evokes many aspects of dictatorship, public and private, and several kinds of ritualized societies. It is the curious, almost imperceptible way in which these layers dissolve in and out of the texture of the work which gives it the ambiguity that is so fascinating. And the movement and the ordering of it are marvelous. In the opening choral hymn, three and four groups of men and women often work contrapuntally, yet everything is made clear and strong, so that you get a sense not of disorder but of accumulating force. The movement is full of angles-flexed feet, bodies bent at the hips, sharp turns at wrist and elbow and knee. Executed in steadily pulsing or pounding rhythms, it looks elemental and extraordinary at the same time. The spareness of individual gestures is wonderful: the Matriarch lifts a leg only twice, and it becomes an extension of her pointing, accusatory fingers.

For With My Red Fires, the Repertory Company was augmented by Connecticut College dance students in order to make up the ensemble of 20. They all danced quite splendidly. Indeed, the company is performing so well together now that it is a pity it must disband when the summer is over. Dalienne Majors, looking at moments uncannily like photographs of Doris Humphrey, projected a great deal of demented strength into the Matriarch's rigid twistings and writhings. Nina Watt with her soft fragility, her pallor, her slight and touching awkwardness made the girl into a sacrificial lamb, and Raymond Johnson was warm and ardent as the young man. Marc Stevens as the Herald did some splendid leaps. Now and then, other figures emerged from the group, too-Pamela Knisel and Ryland Jordan stretching toward each other in the little duct, Randall Faxon jumping ecstatically at the center of a jubilant trio.

We owe the reconstruction of this Humphrey masterpiece, not only to the dancers, the college, the festival directors, and numerous granting organizations, but to the Labanotation bureau, to Christine Clark who staged it, and to Ruth Currier who acted as artistic adviser. Thank God they thought of doing it and managed to do it so well.