How is an audience supposed to receive a 60-year-old dance just getting its American premiere in 2012? As something new or something nostalgic? As something to be taken seriously or something to be taken with a grain of salt?
Surely, there was excitement in the room Friday night when Cleo Parker Robinson Dance presented the legendary American choreographer Katherine Dunham’s long-lost “Southland,” and not just because 83-year-old Julie Belafonte, one of Dunham’s original dancers and a consultant on the project, was sitting sixth row center.
This was a historic moment for the company, and the dancers, along with a handful of singers, proved themselves up to the important task. Dunham’s piece, too, was effective after all these years. Its tale of brutal racism — a lynching and its long aftermath — told in emotional shorthand remains wrenching, vexing, raw.
Friday night at the Newman Center, it did feel like something new but also something from another era. In 2012, the work offered no revelation in terms of movement — how could it with six decades of dance evolution leading the genre forward since its creation? — but it had the aura of something that must be revered, and needed to be danced again, because of its own story.
Dunham premiered the work in Santiago, Chile, in 1951, but its candid American horror story forced it quickly underground. The piece was shown in Paris in 1953 and then never again. Cleo Parker Robinson Dance is restaging it with help from a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
If the dance’s format of songs and movement felt dated this weekend, its sentiment held steady. This was due as much to its choreographer’s timeless theme as it was to the way the company brought it to life. Dunham created a dance that is dramatic, even for its intense subject matter, and this troupe respected that. There was no holding back in terms of movement or acting. The work got the respect it deserved.
The two-act piece opens on a plantation with a quartet of singers setting the time through spiritual takes on American folk songs, Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home,” the Confederate theme “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” Soon, the stage is crowded with black plantation workers, grinning with greatly emphasized enthusiasm and dancing joyously in group form. Their movements, in a circle, in sync, imply a unity among them. Their constant smiles signify contentment in their existence.
That’s an odd choice — a fulfillment within the circumstances of economic slavery — but it serves the real purpose of making these people human, whole, real (if with a shade of minstrelsy about it).
Soon after, one of the workers is hanging from a tree, lynched after being accused of raping a white woman.
The second act moves to another century, to segregated Basin Street in New Orleans, where more contemporary African-Americans sing and dance in an early-20th-century style. Their fun falls to a quiet, frozen hush as the slaves appear from another era carrying the body of the lynched man.
The singular act ties together generations of mistreatment of blacks in the South. Racism seems endless and inevitable.
“Southland” is very much an ensemble piece, but it brought out star turns in key dancers Edgar Page, Devin Baker, Susan Richardson and Roxanne Young. And in singers Darla Herndon, Brian Tarver, Mary Louis Lee and Ronald White.
“Southland” continues at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts, University of Denver. Sunday 2 p.m. Tickets $28-$40. 303-871-7720, cleoparkerdance.com
