sarma

Alvin Ailey has decided to do his bit for history: he's trying to have certain important works from the recent past mounted for his company. This Roots of the American Dance program has begun with a staging of Ted Shawn's Kinetic Molpai. What a dance. It's grandiose, smugly chauvinistic, and at the same time strong, plain, and cleanly made. As my husband said, it makes you want to bravo and boo at the same time.

Shawn made Kinetic Molpai at Jacob's Pillow in 1935 for his famous men's company. It racked up 500 performances on the road, although in this Ailey restaging (by Barton Mumaw) the work is getting its first New York performance. I saw it in the early '60s when Shawn revived it at the Pillow with a hastily assembled, but all-star cast (Norman Walker did Shawn's role).

According to the program, the themes of the dance are Strife, Oppositions, Solvent, Dynamic Contrasts, Resilience, Successions, Folding and Unfolding, Dirge, Limbo, Surge, and Apotheosis. A neat blend of manly emotions and dance problems. Kinetic Molpai as a whole is a pictorialization of masculine energy. The nine bare-chested dancers thrust their heels forward into big purposeful strides; they clench their fists, assume heroic, broadbased stances. Everything they do is immensely emphatic and deliberately-paced. The space patterns-circles, squares, parallel lines, diagonals-reinforce the feeling of joy in a Spartan, well-regulated life. In more negative moments, the dancers sag utterly - dumping their weight on the earth, bowing their backs under mighty burdens. In one important moment, they create a vast canonic wave of fails and rises. You leave Kinetic Molpai remembering the plumb line of the erect body, a few romantic curvings away from that line, and the hasty, resolute way the men return to upright postures after their moments of near-prone despair.

Shawn was a great haver-and-eater-of-cake. For most of Kinetic Molpai, he wanted to show what he thought a real American man dancing ought to look like: strong, assertive, brave, forward-looking, kinda plain, able to flourish under discipline. The sort of guy who obeys orders unquestioningly when he must, but who shows initiative and daring when given a chance. And then, somehow, Shawn could not resist adding: and we American Modern Dancers, we Real Men Dancing, can beat you ballet boys at your own game any time we want to. So in the Apotheosis, the clenched fists flutter open, and the men take off into some basic, aerial ballet combinations in waitz-time. The leader whips off a string of fouettés stage center. Even though a few of the men solo in big, forceful leaping passages, the feeling is still - compared with the preceding parts of Molpai - radiantly effete. Having proved their virility by a lot of somber posturing, the men can now show the audience that dancing is not for sissies. It was a fine and necessary message during the '30s.

And the dance is very enjoyable. The Ailey dancers (Dudley Williams, Kelvin Rotardier, Hector Mercado, Clover Mathis, Kenneth Pearl, Michihiko Oka, Masasumi Chaya, Dennis Plunkett, with John Parks as the leader) are not yet quite tidy enough doing it, but they look splendid, and they are, so far, resisting the temptation to pander to those in the audience who see the dance mostly as Camp.

What makes you want to laugh is not so much the choreography or the ideas behind the dance, but the relationship of the movement to its accompaniment. Jess Meeker's piano score (played by the composer and Mary Campbell) was designed to support and underline not only every mood but every gesture. It reminds you of the kind of clueing-in that piano music for silent movies was supposed to do. This use of music was part of the aesthetic of early Modern Dance, and you have to appreciate that fact even though you laugh at the kitsch of a downward-plunging scale to accompany a fall and a heroic major triad that jerks the faller to his feet again.