DANCE REVIEW
Sokolow’s potent legacy remembered
One of the dance world’s true pioneers, Anna Sokolow (1910-2000) was imaginative, iconoclastic, and uncompromising for nearly seven decades, with choreography ranging from works reflecting her early days as a dancer with Martha Graham to multimedia compositions for theatrical presentation, not to mention dances for the original off-Broadway production of “Hair.’’
Sokolow Now!, led by Lorry May, who danced with Sokolow for over 30 years, aims to keep the choreographer’s legacy alive. Saturday night’s program at Boston University Dance Theater offered three works, interspersed with video clips of Sokolow talking about her process and philosophy. The light-hearted spoof “A Short Lecture and Demonstration on the Evolution of Ragtime’’ showed Sokolow’s sense of humor, as Kirsten McKinney and Mark Kranz comically interpreted different dance styles introduced by lecturer Suellen Haag. Cute, but its stilted theatricality looked dated and amateurish.
However, the other two works illustrated Sokolow’s darker, more dramatic side, and the company danced them with commitment and polish. The 1952 “Lyric Suite’’ and the signature “Dreams’’ (1961) showed the choreographer’s leanings toward stark, post-modern severity, painting with broad strokes instead of flashy steps, favoring silence and stillness, refusing to follow melodic line or rhythmic pulse. As Sokolow admitted in one of the video clips, “The only way to be popular is to be nice, harmless. . . . That doesn’t interest me.’’
The potency of both works is cumulative. What the viewer takes away isn’t movement invention as much as powerful context and imagery that sears itself into the brain. “Lyric Suite,’’ danced to Alban Berg’s eponymous quartet, has an austere elegance and formality. Whitney Hoke danced with fierce abandon, matching the pizzicatos and tremolos in the music with quivering hands and skitters across the floor. With arms outstretched, face raised to the ceiling or ducked abjectly, McKinney was a soul-searching supplicant. The final tableau was gorgeous — four women in long, flowing red, gliding side to side, forward and back, in shifting, interlocking patterns.
“Dreams,’’ Sokolow’s artistic reaction to the Holocaust, remains her masterpiece. Fractured and disjunct, it is nonetheless filled with haunting, unforgettable imagery. A woman in white crawls atop the shoulders of men in black, the clapping of hands on thighs like slamming doors. Hands repeatedly cover eyes, mouths, ears, refusing to acknowledge. A small child comforts a woman, then collapses. A mound of bodies, arms upraised, fingers splayed, melts to the floor with a mournful communal sigh.
Karen Campbell can be reached at karencampbell4@rcn.com. 
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
