CriticalDance Forum

Dancers look lively leaping among styles

The Boston Conservatory Dance Theater is on a mission: to school not just its students but also the public in the classics from both the ballet and the modern traditions. It’s an admirable goal, achieved in part through the staging, by noted professionals, of pieces by modern legends such as Jose Limon and Murray Louis whose works would otherwise probably never see the light of day in these parts.

Dances show versatility, historic perspective

The Boston Conservatory Dance Theater is obsessed with context. In its shows, it doesn't just present dances; it raises questions about where those dances belong in history and how each has led to or grown from others.

Friday night was no exception. The three works on the program could not have been more different. Laszlo Berdo's ''Opus 1,'' presented in a premiere, is a straight-ahead classical ballet, toe shoes and all; it springs directly from the music. Jose Limon's ''Missa Brevis'' (1958) is an example of modern dance with a capital M: Eschewing balletic prettiness, it's a communal cry in the early modern style, complete with architecturally poised masses and aching thrusts. Meaning drives its form. Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett's ''Knowing We Can Never Know,'' another premiere, takes Limon's narrative approach into the 21st century. It's a roiling, boiling pot of emotion shaped not so much by patterns as by movement motifs. The dancers sprint from style to style with impressive ease, embodying some of them rapaciously, others more tentatively.

The rose and the scimitar
The Kirov’s Fokine, plus Boston Conservatory

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BOSTON CONSERVATORY is the main professional school for dancers here besides Boston Ballet, and its concerts always feature great music performed live by the music students.

.... Now 84, [Yuriko's] traveling around the country reconstructing Graham dances for dance companies, universities, and schools, often donating her services. Her self-described Arigato Project -- "thank you" in Japanese -- is a way of sharing with the young dancers what she learned from her master teacher.

Dancers want to fly as much as Icarus did: Hence all those ballets with bird protagonists. Modern dancers tend to be more grounded than their classical counterparts, but they, too, sometimes yearn to escape gravity.

Flying factors into each of the three works on this weekend’s program performed by the Boston Conservatory Dance Theater.

Boston Conservatory Dance Theater’s concerts last weekend didn’t have their usual support from the conservatory’s fine student orchestra. Whether by choice or necessity, the absence of live music opened up some choreographic territory beyond what can be framed by a smallish ensemble of classical players. None of the recorded selections was well served by the theater’s low-fidelity sound system, though.

Boston Conservatory Dance Theater’s breathtaking new program, “Three Modern Masters,” is a welcome reminder that there was once a time when modern dance was about grandeur.

This is an extremely rare opportunity to see masterpieces by the late choreog-raphers Alwin Nikolais and Martha Graham, as well as the living legend Murray Louis.

.... For dancers, the opportunities to practice the acknowledged masterpieces in the field are too few. Dance often goes unrecorded, so the people who carry important choreography in their muscles and minds are precious resources..... the performers conveyed not just steps but style. They showed Graham’s emotions, which spring from the gut; Nikolais’s geometric abstraction, which avoids emotion altogether; and Louis’s rambunctious acrobatics. The flavor of each work was distinct and nuanced.

Conservatory honors legendary Louis
Less than a week after his 79th birthday, Boston Conservatory Dance Theater pays Louis homage in Boston tonight through Sunday, and again next month in New York at Hunter College. The program, “A Tribute to Murray Louis,” features three highlights from his illustrious career.

Dancespeak
Boston Conservatory’s Murray Louis tribute

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When Yasuko Tokunaga decided to create a tribute to American choreographer Murray Louis, she allowed the Boston Conservatory’s pre-professional students to focus their attentions more clearly than they can in mixed rep. It was more than time for a local organization to mount a Louis tribute: though he’s been ailing, he was on hand last Thursday night in a dapper moustache and graphic argyle sweater to accept a bouquet in appreciation of his half-century of dancing and dance making.