Dionysiacs

By T.E.K.

THE AMERICAN DANCE MACHINE

If the book is the mind of a musical and song is its voice, the dance is its body. Dancers are engines of the Life Force. Whether their arms and legs create designs of mass unity or tell a balletic joke or commingle in primordial fertility rites, the dancers celebrate the grace, power and beauty of the human form.

What of the king of the gypsies, the choreographer? The book is printed, the songs are often recorded, but the dances recede into the mists of ever fainter memory. In 1975, Lee Theodore founded a company specifically dedicated to retrieving and reperforming dance treasures of the U.S. musical theater. With Denny Shearer as Dance-Narrator, The American Dance Machine at Broadway's Century Theater is a handsome retrospective tribute to some of the top U.S. choreographers. Films aside, when was the last time you saw Michael Kidd's Whip Dance from Destry Rides Again (1959) or Bob Fosse's Rich Kid's Rag from Little Me (1962) or Onna White's If the Rain's Gotta Fall from Half a Sixpence (1965) or Danny Daniels' board-splintering Clog Dance from Walking Happy (1966), just to list a few?

The entire company is one of agile Dionysiacs. But some celestial potter who fashions divinity from clay must be responsible for Janet Eilber. She is a long-stemmed American beauty of absolute skill and mesmeric dramatic presence. In Agnes de Mille's Funeral Dance from Brigadoon (1947) she turns a young widow's grief into a threnody of rage, and in Come to Me, Bend to Me from the same musical she wondrously conveys a bride-to-be's hot blood and apprehensive ecstasy before the marriage bed. Broadway may be watching a future star.

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