West Side Story . . .Garth Fagan Dance Spring season with Billy Bang

OK, as you may know or not, the humble writer of this blog not a dancer (if you saw a picture, there'd be NO doubt).  It's one reason I rarely use the first person in a post; I'm just reporting the facts, ma'am (and sir).  I came to be writing this blog as a way to help out the Friends of Brockport Dance and the Dance Program at SUNY Brockport, as I know the principals of each and supported the goals of the Friends. However, I recently realized that, somehow, after living in Rochester since 2002, I had managed not to see Garth Fagan's work other than taking my wife Dianna to see the Lion King when it was at the Auditorium Theater. As the writer of a dance blog, the weight of that omission became heavier since Garth Fagan Dance is such a treasure in Rochester's many artists. When they announced the Spring Season it gave me the chance I was looking for and I went for it. The fact that it had a tie in to jazz with the Billy Bang Septet providing live music for a suite of dances made it a must see for me (if you don't know, I also do a blog about live jazz here in Rochester).  When the group performs in the Rochester area it often is at Nazareth College on the east side of the city, but this first Spring program in a number of years was done on the west side in conjunction with a residency at the Greece Athena Center for Performing Arts.

I really haven't done this before in this blog, but these performances have been percolating in my brain since Saturday and I need to express.  Damn!  Eloquent, maybe not, but it expresses how I felt while watching the performances.  One after another I sat there, drinking in the movement and the sound. Best of Brockport Dance had a similar effect on me, but perhaps the newness of seeing Fagan's dance choreography for the first time (at least without the animal costumes) brought it closer to the surface. I love the way that Garth Fagan layers different cultural and dance references and traditions in his choreography, with movements from African, Afro-Caribbean dance interspersed with ballet, modern dance, and even ballroom.  The dances ranged across the history of the Garth Fagan Dance group, which was founded in 1978, and showed the broad and deep talent of the dancers in his ensemble.

Of course, I had a special place reserved for the tryptich of dances that the dancers performed with the Billy Bang Septet. I've seen Bang perform a few times here in Rochester (see here for the most recent on my jazz blog) and have been transfixed by the mastery that he and his bandmates show of their instruments and deep emotion that comes out of his playing as he seeks to work through his Vietnam War demons or swings into another solo.  A new and wonderful layer was added to the music I had heard performed before as movement was added; I couldn't see Billy and his band (they were in the pit), only the dancers.

As I'm sure many of my Brockport readers know, Garth is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at SUNY and taught at Brockport for over 30 years.  But the connections to Brockport Dance are much more than that. Of his current company, the following are former students in the Dance Program at Brockport: Nicolette Depass, Kevin Moore, and Todd Vanslambrouck.  It is heartening to see the results of this thing we are supporting in the movement of these dancers.