Philadanco marks 40 years with a standout program

We often speak of Philadelphia treasures, and Joan Myers Brown has been one of the city's most valuable assets for the last 40 years. Forty years!

As founder and artistic director of Philadanco - the Philadelphia Dance Company - her reach here and around the world has won her fond acclaim, including this year's Philadelphia Award. Thursday's 40th-anniversary opening performance at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater portended nothing but more smooth sailing for this helmswoman and her brilliant company.

The program leads the audience through a sampler of Brown's favorite choreographers. Philadanco's current cadre of dancers is so strong and well-matched it's hard to single out individuals, and Brown made sure to use big dances that could show them all off. The three pieces from the '80s reveal the athleticism typical of that period, but as with the music of Philip Glass or Meredith Monk of the same era, they do not all display a sense of timelessness.

There exist many iconic works in 20th-century American dance, and a particularly memorable one - not on Thursday's program - is "Mourner's Bench," from Talley Beatty's Southern Landscapes. Performed almost entirely in slow, horizontal positions on a bench, it is among the most difficult and athletic male solos ever. I've seen many men take it on, including former Philadanco star Ahmad Lemmons, and its meaning goes deep for each of them. So it's hard to wrap your head around the fact that the same choreographer made the very vertical, whiplash-fast 1985 A Rag, A Bone and a Hank of Hair that opened Thursday's show.

Its candy-colored costumes, zingy happiness, and booty shimmies contrasted greatly with Milton Myers' 1987 primitive fantasy The Element From Which It Comes. Schoolgirls in the audience tittered when the men leapt out in revealing loincloths to Glass's Koyaanisqatsi (later joined by Monk's vocalization) but soon settled into the drama among the 16 dancers - 15 company members and apprentice Jodi Pickens. Each time the women leapt onto the men's shoulders from a running start, the audience gasped, including me. Veteran company members Tommie-Waheed Evans, Odara N. Jabali Nash, and Brandon Glasgow dominated the stage, but Chloe O. Davis, point person in this dance, and Rosita Adamo and Jesse Sani also thrilled.

Gene Hill Sagan's 1984 Elegy, followed in another change of pace, with music of Ralph Vaughan Williams and a starry-night backdrop. The men, bare-chested again, also dominated in this work, which had a standout trio by Nash, Evans, and Joan Kilgore.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar set By Way of the Funk (the company premiere of this commission) to the music of the Funkadelics, with its outer-space affinities to Sun Ra. It had the women in bright white Afro wigs, and the entire company wigging out to the funk until Lamar Baylor connected directly with the audience to bring it, and the evening, to a thunderous and joyful close.

Brown's contributions to Philadelphia's African American community, and to audiences and the city at large, are immeasurable. For her work as artist and ambassador, she is eminently deserving of this year's Philadelphia Award - and of our applause.

Additional performances.