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> Rod Rodgers Dance Company is the creation of a comparatively recent but exciting recruit to professional dance, who in 1967 helped form the Association of Black Choreographers with the stated aim of discovering "the dancers' identity of Rhythm the Ritual, Afro in which American."the dance identity of the Afro American." Rodgers' Rhythm Ritual, in which his dancers provided their own exotic accompaniment by beating sticks and bells, seemed like an ongoing experiment that has not yet found a final form. But in Harambee!, a drama about martyred black leaders, accompanied by five on stage drummers, his flair for sound and atmosphere brightened the stage of the ANTA with vivid scenes: the shooting of a black chief, a bust by the authorities, the re birth of rebellion in the up surge of anger that follows.
> José Limón Dance Company finds a major U.S. dancer and choreographer now watching from the wings (Limón is 64), but still managing to charge a young, vibrant ensemble with his familiar spirit, dignity and eloquence of movement. One new Limn work, The Unsung, a choreographically skillful paean to America's vanquished Indian heroes, was imbued with all of the solemnity of an Indian sun dance and, unfortunately, much of its tedium. But Orfeo, a free, ever-unwinding retelling of the old legend set to Beethoven's String Quartet No. 11, summoned up the poetic suggestiveness and exquisite line that characterized his first big success, The Moor's Pavane, which is still a favorite with the American Ballet Theater. Less striking but still provocative were Dances for Isadora, which drew on the Duncan story to fashion a subtle metaphor of death-in-life and life-in-death, and Carlata, a mad court fantasy (danced to silence) about the widow of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. Where is the permanent theater home that Limon deserves?
> Erick Hawkins Dance Company is the current forum for the abstract, avantgarde, and sometimes uneven work of a former husband and partner of Martha Graham. Hawkins regularly choreographs his works before his long-time collaborator, Composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, writes the music. This rather strange reversal of step and beat, not to mention cart and horse, too often showed in what might have been called the super-calisthenicization of his choreography. Yet Hawkins frequently attained a timeless mood in such Oriental-flavored works as Dawn Dazzled Door. The psuedo-Apollonian Angels of the Inmost Heaven featured a quartet of beauties who appeared topless to the accompaniment of a quintet of brass. Although Hawkins deployed the girls with such ritualistic restraint that the effect was almost asexual, the work succeeded in one kind of choreography that few other companies in the marathon have mastered: the concerted movement of large numbers of people past the box office and into the auditorium.