In last night's cast, Luis Dominguez was the tormented hero, Tai Jimenez his sweetheart, Lowell Smith his cruel nemesis each was superb, their characters drawn in sharp but never caricatured outline, physically feverish and driven. Still, the ballet treads a thin, discomforting line here and there between sympathetic preachment and opportunism.įor the DTH cast, however, it's all gravy, with the added savory irony of being able, as African Americans, for once to portray vicious brutes in whiteface. And it is to his credit that the piece, for all its simplistic bravado, never turns bathetic or lugubrious. Smuin was careful to enlist Native American consultants for the sake of respectful authenticity.
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There's an effectively brooding, violent score by Charles Fox, but the piece also employs traditional Indian singers and drummers (the Tootoosie Family), and for the depiction of the hero's ancestors and their rites, full traditional regalia. Smuin, a skilled and experienced hand at theatrical prestidigitation, pulls out all the stops of modern stagecraft - including translucent scrims, slide projections, illusionist effects and lighting, stage mist, startling simulacra of a buffalo herd and giant, nightmare villains - to magnify the melodramatic possibilities and drive them home. "Warriors" is a kind of parable of Native American courage in the teeth of the depredations of white oppressors, as exemplified by the life cycle of a young Indian whose lover is gang-raped by a brutal sheriff and his cohorts, and who is then slain after wreaking terrible vengeance.
Or a time when there seemed a more abundant store of individual talent, ranging from seasoned artists to thrillingly developing comers to promising tyros.
Even so, it's hard to recall a time since the troupe's beginnings, 2 1/2 decades ago, when the dancers have taken the stage with a greater sense of authority and their own remarkable worth. DTH has long since earned its spurs as a world-class ensemble. The company, moreover, was looking wonderfully fit and fiery. "Warriors" may have been the evening's most explicit sensation, but it was a rather smashing program all around, starting as it did with Balanchine's spiffy abstraction, "Allegro Brillante," and closing, after the Smuin, with another recent DTH acquisition, the sweeping Alvin Ailey-Duke Ellington epic "The River." The Dance Theatre of Harlem acquired the piece for its own repertory this season, and deploys all its accustomed theatrical savvy therein to maximum effect. To be exact about it, the last time the Opera House erupted in quite this fashion for a ballet was after a performance in 1985 by the San Francisco Ballet - of Michael Smuin's "A Song for Dead Warriors." Smuin, at the time, was artistic director of the San Francisco troupe he'd created the work for them in 1979, and later received an Emmy for its national telecast. At its grimly elegiac conclusion, the crowd rose virtually as a body, shouting and cheering for minutes. If memory isn't playing me false, we haven't seen an audience demonstration at a dance performance like the one provoked last night by Michael Smuin's "A Song for Dead Warriors" - as brilliantly rendered by the Dance Theatre of Harlem in its opening program at the Kennedy Center Opera House - in many a moon.
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