Recordare was inspired by the Limon Company's residence in Mexico City in 1951 where Jose Limon created his first large ensemble works, his "lost" Mexican works, and collaborated directly with internationally important Mexican composers and designers.
What the audience actually saw at Saturday night's performance of Recordare was a hugely enjoyable evocation of Mexico's Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). A small set piece upstage center evoked the façade of a church from which emerges a coffin and mourners. The Widow has just commenced a dance of mourning when the coffin breaks open and a garish skeleton emerges. The mourners lift their faces to reveal that they too are skeletons and for a moment, widow and audience alike are beset by North American / Hollywood horror of death.
But things quickly revert to the macabre whimsy and gentle humor characteristic of Dia de los Muertos; when next the curtains covering the church doors open we see three merry mariachis, skeletons all, a bride and groom, and so on for eight scenes.
One of these Retablos ("little boxes" depicting the dead engaged in domestic activities) shows us a couple in their bed. When they are set upon by an assassin with a cleaver the husband's grisly murder is so deliberately over the top as to be hilarious rather than horrible. Thanks to the young wife's ardent prayers, Santa Maria intercedes and brings the husband back to life; as this vignette ends the couple climbs back into bed, the husband still sporting the cleaver stuck through his skull.
The final scene depicts the healing of a terribly afflicted man by a woman saint. After the healing is complete, he climbs into her arms (he is one of the largest men in the company and she is one of the smallest women) and she carries him into the church.
You could say it's more a theater piece than a dance. Two of the eight scenes are ensemble dances: "Danza Folklorica" is a straightforward Mexican polka performed by four couples in traditional white peasant garb; Lullaby for the Dead is more of a modern dance in atmospheric dappled lighting. What dancing there is in Recordare is unpretentious, mostly rough stuff, wholly in the service of the scenario and true to the village setting that it references. Yet Lubovitch's hand is sure as he takes us from horror to hilarity and finally to a moving depiction of a healing. Lubovitch's Recordare was, as we've said, hugely enjoyable.
And how did the Limon works on the program look after half a century? Pretty powerful.
Choreographic Offering is a visualization of Bach's Musical Offering. It begins with a succession of couples crossing the stage and quickly develops into a group dance featuring the circle dances so typical to Limon. A man's solo typifies the control and strength Limon himself was famous for. As the tempos quicken and the ensembles grow larger the unison (sometimes shaky at the very beginning) becomes sharper and the audience's enthusiasm becomes more apparent. At the curtain calls, the groups of young dancers in the audience are particularly audible; they have developed favorites in the company over the previous days of master classes and lecture demonstrations.
Moor's Pavane retells through dance the story of the lost handkerchief at the core of Shakespeare's Othello; it was no doubt familiar to many in the audience; it is, we believe, the company's most frequently performed piece. But nobody left early and it was a moving and powerful ending, reminding one what the durability of the Limon legacy is all about.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Victor Lucas and Elsa Johnson vicnelsaAtearthlink.net (:divend:)