A quartet of illustrious alumni return for Philadanco premieres

Philadanco’s footprint reaches far beyond Philadelphia. The 52-year-old company has toured all over the world and has alumni on Broadway and in other major dance companies.

Closer home, its illustriousness was on clear display on Friday night at its home theater, the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Cultural Campus, where the company opened its fall series. The program, called “Continuum: New, Now, Next,” featured new choreography by four impressive alumni.

The evening opened with Seasons, a world premiere by Francisco Gella (who danced with the company in the 1990s), to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons recomposed by Max Richter. Never have dancers looked so good in gold lamé. Gella reworked the theme, determining the feeling behind the seasons beyond the standard colors and important dates. So fall becomes Anticipation, winter is Jubilation, etc. The dancing is sublime.

For Anticipation, the group performs all the same steps together, in three rows that occasionally alternate, like a dance class returning to session after the summer. Some of the other sections went so fast, though, with several duets in a row, that it was hard to appreciate or absorb the meaning before we moved on to the next.

The highlight was Mikaela Fenton’s Revelation solo, full of impressive stretches and strength, but most of all showed off her exceptionally flexible arched feet.

Bernard Gaddis was the youngest male dancer ever hired by Philadanco, at 15. He was also the founding director of its second company, D2, and later a principal dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. His piece, Stolen Moments, was a company premiere and featured music by four composers, including Hans Zimmer and Ryuichi Sakamoto. It, too, was beautiful, but a large percentage of the soundscape included a very loud vibration that demanded all attention.

In this piece, the dancers were frequently paired for intimate moments, including a dramatic one where a man throws a woman, another man catches her, and she remains wrapped tightly around his body during a second couple’s duet before slowly sliding to the floor.

Hope Boykin danced with Philadanco before a long successful career at Ailey that ended at the beginning of the pandemic. She has since become a successful choreographer and frequent visitor to Philadelphia companies. She works with spoken word poetry that she writes, which was used along with music by Jason Moran, in the world premiere solo she created for Clarricia Golden, My Time … Soar. The piece speaks about self-doubt and obstacles and eventually learning to use them to one’s advantage.

Golden showed great depth of emotion as she curled up on the ground, worked and reworked a group of five chairs on the stage, found herself imprisoned by their formation, and eventually climbed over them.

”Continuum” wraps up with Out-Side In, a delightful hip-hop piece by Ephrat Asherie, a Bessie Award-winning choreographer and b-girl, who danced with Philadanco in a James Brown tour in 2013. Her piece focused on what Phillies fans might refer to as “Dancing on My Own,” which most dancers did in the early phases of the pandemic. But here, in a highly physical and fun world premiere, she shows the dancers breaking out of their living rooms and kitchens to dance in groups and with pure joy.

Founder and artistic adviser Joan Myers Brown (who is 90 and hired her longtime assistant Kim Bears-Bailey to replace her as artistic director in 2020) has long said the company’s artistic roots go much farther than the strides the company manages to make at home in Philadelphia. And indeed, there were a good number of empty seats. This series was only through the weekend, but Philadanco will be back in April.

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