Old dances can be like mummies — disheveled, musty and in danger of collapsing into dust. The company José Limón founded 65 years ago exhumed two of the modern-dance pioneer’s best works this week, but couldn’t resurrect them.
“The Emperor Jones,” made in 1956, is a fantasy based on Eugene O’Neill’s play about the rise and fall of a prison escapee who becomes the ruler of an island.
Tuesday night, the wiry Daniel Fetecua Soto gave a Napoleonic performance as Jones, moving with officious dignity as he strode and glared. In an outfit heaped with bright colors and gold braid, he’s a candy tyrant. Yet the disjointed narrative seems as dated and flimsy as Jones’ enormous papier-mâché throne.
A 1942 solo, “Chaconne,” shows the style the Mexican-American choreographer was known for, one that emphasized fluidity over virtuosity. Working to the famous Bach piece, handsomely played onstage by violinist Kinga Augustyn, Roxane D’Orleans Juste curled slowly around the stage in weighty walks and flourishes. But she had trouble with the simplicity of the solo — there were small bobbles when she balanced, and she never gave the dance full justice.
The company went far-ther afield for the last two pieces. Debussy’s shimmering piano piece “La Cathé-drale Engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral),” which inspired Jiri Kylian’s 1975 quartet, also was played live.
The Czech-born choreographer has described the dance as a complex spiritual conflict, but it’s hard to see that in this scene, set at the water’s edge.
The four dancers work in pairs, scurrying as they cradle one another. The music is fractured as well. At times, only snippets are played before receding into silence — and like the relationships, it all remains enigmatic.
After the old came the new. The finale, “Come With Me,” is a premiere by Brazilian choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras to music — recorded, alas — by Cuban jazz great Paquito D’Rivera.
Despite the riotous colors of the men’s pants and a lot of shimmying to spirited music, “Come With Me” has no more life in it than the mummies. D’Rivera writes of his inspiration by the Cuban dissident group Ladies in White, but in section after section of Latin dancing, all Pederneiras offered were steps to music. Turn off the recording, and there’s little left.