sarma

Gus Solomons, Jr. has taken this big plunge, and I hadn't even noticed. He's always been prolific and gracefully accommodating -could produce a dance for anywhere any time, but he's also been a witty maverick. I've liked the combination of suaveness and violence in his dances; I remember the way he sketched himself during a solo as if it were no more than a bit of trendy game-playing, and then slashed the drawing to pieces with his pencil. Or the way he tap-danced (wearing his blackness imperturbably, like a costume) while we listened to a newscast of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I liked solos we had to accompany by rustling our programs, or dances he never even showed up for, just left taped insinuations about our inevitable audiencedance.

Solomons has been doing group pieces for quite a while. And now suddenly I notice that Solomons the choreographer is in the service of something called The Solomons Company; and for this touring unit he must make dances that travel well. He has decided, apparently, to go the whole hog, to make a program in which components like wit and seriousness, dancing and drama, complexity and comprehensibility are carefully balanced. He is concerned with showing off his dancers and with having them spell each other so tidily that there are no unwieldy pauses between numbers. I understand what he's doing; I don't think he's losing any integrity by doing so; I imagine he's got the skill to pull it off. Only, during this transition period for Solomons the choreographer, I feel bereft of Gus's old sardonic, stonily sporty choreographic profile, and can't yet grasp a new identity.

What has this pretty solo for Randall Faxon to do with either Randall Faxon or Gus Solomons? In 'Stoneflesh", why do the muscle men in glittering jockstraps keep leaving the finely constructed, deliberate, unflashy dancing they're doing to streak across the stage in diagonals of fancy leaps like something out of "Etudes"? The dance has so much impressive dancing that could be serious, lively, and friendly; why the dancers' hunted, Béjartian stares at the audience and the miniscule eye-grabbing ball baskets?

Why the brilliant colored lights (designed by Ruis Woertendyke)? In "Stoneflesh", the dancers often have one bicep outlined in green light, the other in dayglo pink, while amber beams streak across their bellies. The stage looks like one of those luscious record jackets favored by the acid rock set.

At its ATL concerts, the Solomons Company presented several works new to New York, but seasoned by touring. "A Shred of Prior Note" is a quartet that breaks down into duets -Valerie Hammer with Ben Dolphin, Randall Faxon with Douglas Nielson. The feeling is one of passion and alienation, and the Hammer-Dolphin duet has many interestingly obdurate, frozen-looking lifts and supports. There are oddly light touches, though, like a man and a woman prancing lightly around, side by side, arms about each others' waists. "Molehill" is mysterious, and as flat in space as a cardboard Punch and Judy show. Solomons in ragged clothes drags his way in babysteps across the stage, bent over to suggest he's ascending a mountain. In the second part ("Plateau"), Santa Aloi and Ruedi Brack sit stiffly on chairs and stare through us. He is in white military dress uniform, she's wearing a tutu. They move, as does Solomons, like figures on some puzzling music box. They rarely look at each other, although they abruptly edge closer to each other, then apart, and once he imitates her awkward ballerina poses -first accurately, then garishly. At the end, Solornons trudges across again.

It struck me at some point that Solomons (a magnificent giraffe of a dancer whose compact torso often looks about to rip apart from the lashing power accumulated by his long arms and legs) and his dancers haven't yet found a performing style to fit their new dramatic dances. They're used to staring coolly past their own dancing, or reacting to each other with minimum spontaneous emotion. Some of them seem to find it hard to warm up on stage and work at it overeagerly. In Solomons', bright gamedance "Par/tournament", they now never stop their vocal egging-on of each contestant.

It's interesting in light of their rather unbending demeanor that Solomons structured his most interesting new piece. "Yesterday", as a series of solos, with himself as a man looking back on his past, speaking Ethan Ayer's poetry in mellifluous, highly stylized Dylan Thomas tones. Ben Dolphin, leaping and twisting, represents the hero as a boy, I guess; and Ruedi Brack, helmeted, given to striking square heroic postures and doggedly repeating his dance themes, shows us the narrator (1 think) as a young man naively idealistic, off to battle waving banners. Santa Aloi, narrow and rigid on a wooden bench, patters out a dance of repression and frustration. Randall Faxon is the swirling goddess -earth or moon, it doesn't matter- who expresses a luminous acceptance of destiny. I'm only playing; I don't really know what the dance is about. But I noticed in this dance that Solomons was allowing his ideas to pull the dancers bodies into expressive shapes and rhythms.

I'll have to get used to this new Gus Solomons. In honor of the old one.