An homage to black dance

When you're paying homage to your own heritage, race matters. After years of building and touring it, No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers finally came to Philadelphia at the Painted Bride over the weekend.

Gesel Mason, a midcareer dancer/choreographer who danced with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Washington, began the project with Cheles Rhynes under their company, Mason/Rhynes Productions. She approached the cream of African American choreographers to set solos on her, little dreaming that many of them would say yes.

And little did she dream the show would become an evolving view of black dance that reaches as far back as Donald McKayle's 1948 Saturday's Child and right up to the moment with a piece of her own. The show included video of the choreographers with their observations on unique qualities of African American dance, but also about when race doesn't matter.

She opened the show with Rhynes' narrating their 1999 program intro How to Watch a Modern Dance Concert. If the moves didn't match the text so hilariously, it could be more of an educational stunt than a dance piece, but Mason pulled it off as dance, down to the pedestrian street walk.

Next, she soloed in Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Bent with sass, brass, and 'tude, and one amazing, hyperextended leg move while raised in a backbend on the other arm and leg.

In Robert Battle's Ella (to Fitzgerald's "Air Mail Special"), Sarah Levitt smashed herself into the floor only to leap up again and again as if snapped back by an invisible elastic cord. And with arms-outflung abandonment, she looked terrific doing it.

Mason portrayed a slave being beaten for daring to marry in David Rousseve's Jumping the Broom. With hands and feet bound, her body convulsed with each imagined lash of the whip. But it was in McKayle's Saturday's Child (which he originally danced) that she accomplished the impossible. While balancing on one foot, she rocked the other crooked in her arms, crooning to it as if it were a baby.

She included an excerpt of her touch taste see hear breathe. An exploration of female desire, it's still a little undercooked. There are no further performances.