The Crossing
Good dance is like mono-nucleosis, or the spirit of God in an old-time church: contagious. When the gray-haired ladies start shakin’ it in the lobby after the show, you know it’s been a good concert. And that’s the way it was Saturday night after the Joel Hall Dancers’ “The Crossing.” The kids were dancing in the rest room, and the grandmas were dancing in the lobby.
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What makes this jazz-dance concert so successful isn’t the content but the spirit with which it’s presented. Three years ago the Joel Hall Dancers were a so-so jazz-dance company. They had a bit of flash but not a lot of strength. The company’s trademark was its rubber-band flexibility: each dancer could lift her leg above her head and hold it there; each could perform complicated moves in the splits. Hall’s choreography was a glorified form of club dancing, and compositionally it was a few notches above your basic jazz-studio recital fare. Their performances were always entertaining, however, because the dancers loved to move. That passion was and still is infectious.
The program–nine dances separated by seven smaller transitional dances–could make for a long evening, but the energy level is high and the dances are varied in style and content. The music also keeps the evening moving along. Scott Joplin, Pharoah Sanders, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations: Hall’s company has chosen from the canon of best-loved African-American tunes. Because this music is close to the hearts of most Americans, if the choreography had been weak, the music could have been an invitation to disaster.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “The Crossing”.
