Philadanco performed to live music, a pleasure indeed

In a perfect world, all dance would be performed to live music. In reality, it is a luxury few companies can afford.

That's why it was a joy to see Philadanco dance Watching Go By, the Day when it opened a four-performance series called "For Your Pleasure" Friday night at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater. Choreographed by company alumna Hope Boykin, the piece featured 10 dancers plus the Ali Jackson Quintet, which played live on stage. 

Watching Go By, a Philadelphia premiere, is set to an original score by Jackson, and has the dancers reacting to and riffing with the musicians. It starts with the cast, in sleepwear or underwear, snoozing on stage. Each is awakened by a few jazz notes, and lazily rises to start his or her day.

The music picks up as the dancers yawn, stretch, scratch, and groom themselves. A pair dance a sleepy duet, leaning against each other. The day progresses into work, and the movement picks up into running, chaine turns, pirouettes, and an efficient typing sort of tap dance.

Through it all, one man longs for sleep, and he amusingly hits the deck while the night is still young.

The evening opened with Suite Otis, an emotional series of dances set to Otis Redding songs. Lindsey Holmes was particularly moving as a bride in mourning in a section set to "Just One More Day," and Chloe O. Davis and LaMar Baylor were an adorable couple in "Lover's Prayer."

The second half of the program highlighted first the women, then the men. La Valse, choreographed by Gene Hill Sagan, is all about the skirts, as women bouréed and performed a blur of fast balletic turns and leaps to the rising tempest of Ravel's score, sending their black-and-gold dresses aloft.

Christopher Huggins' Blue, for the men in the company, was a show of masculine power, including an impressive move in which two dancers turn, then jump, as two others catch them.

As the program title says, the evening was a pleasure, but not without problems. One dancer fell during La Valse, and another, front and center, kept tugging the waistband of his shorts in Blue. Moments like those broke the magic.