Not many serious choreographers make the transition successfully to Broadway, but not many have the gumption and talent of Garth Fagan, either.
Fagan is Broadway kingpin these days, thanks to “The Lion King.” Judging from appearances here over the weekend at the Auditorium Theatre, his own troupe, Garth Fagan Dance, remains one of the best, guided by a dancemaker whose Great White Way dabbling hasn’t impaired his artistry.
He’s a bedazzler, innovator, classicist and master all in one. Hints of island street strut, from his own Afro-Caribbean background, are woven cleverly, wittily into the otherwise traditional design. The result is something brand new and as old and beautiful as “Giselle.”
Fagan’s “Prelude,” created in 1981 and revised in 1983, is as close to perfect as a work of dance gets.It revels in his love affair with leg extensions, both male and female, balletic in origin yet sublimely contemporary under his guidance. From solos in slow motion to shrewdly designed combinations, he builds to a dazzling series of diagonal marches, the dancers spinning at top speed, repeating each others’ patterns, and then altering them. The classic spin is accented for a while by the split-second use of flailing arms.
The solo “One Postcard” is a tour de force for choreographer and dancer alike. Saturday’s performance by sinewy, statuesque Chris Morrison revealed a man in dress shirt above the waist and only skivvies underneath: a businessman readying for his day’s work. Fagan’s movement is far more subtle, complicated and inexplicable than even that, with Morrison enacting an astonishing range of technical exercises, stretching his leg backward with exquisite grace or executing a rapid shuffle on the heels of the feet.
The final three works were not as consistent or unblemished. Still, they showed off Fagan’s impressive movement vocabulary and musical sensitivity: He doesn’t illustrate the score so much as dip dancers inside it.
In “River Song,” native American tribal dance explodes into gorgeous, complex patterns. “Nkanyit,” a mix of tribal ancestry and modern life, features an ingenious trio for a nuclear family.
The five dances in “Mix 25,” which seamlessly links a score by Brahms, Winton Marsalis and John Cage, boast an inimitable quartet, the four dancers clustered together at center-stage and then evolving apart and returning, like a blossoming flower caught in time-lapse photography.
