Luna Negra fails to catch fire

In our ongoing blog coverage of dance performance, TOC strives to present an array of views on this art form. This dual review of Luna Negra's current show at Harris Theater was filed by senior editor Craig Keller and chief copy editor Jennifer Kester.

Filling a 1,500-seat auditorium is a tall order for most of the mid-tier music and dance ensembles comprising the Harris Theatre’s resident-company roster. So I won’t hold it against Luna Negra that, on the opening night of their three-night fall run here, it appeared that less than two-thirds of the seats were filled. This promising hometown company—whose early and rapid success in its brief eight-year existence has been the envy of many other small companies—certainly deserves your support, but they’re not quite able to justify a triple-header on this stage.

This year’s Harris engagement falls short of the excitement Luna Negra generated here last fall, when Cuban-born artistic director Eduardo Vilaro and his company teamed up with the luminous Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca in a hybrid dance/music-concert program. But music again plays an integral role, literally so in the final piece, Vilaro’s homage to mambo king Xavier Cugat, accompanied by the Mambo 911 Orchestra in the pit.

I thought "CUGAT!" didn’t live up to its capitalization and exclamation point. The couples in the group piece (plus a lone male, ostensibly Cugat) didn’t explode across the stage the way you’d expect in a tableau meant to evoke a fiery, sultry Havana nightclub. There were plenty of lyrics about making out under coconut trees (rendered in cheeky, but somewhat cheesy shoestring-budget-Broadway-musical style, with B&W mobile silhouette cut-outs), and of course the near-standard "Besame Mucho," but there wasn’t  much romantic chemistry among any of the pairs, let alone a kiss.

Of the other three pieces, I didn’t care much for "Allegro con Sabor," which brought together a Luna Negra male-female pair with counterparts from the Joffrey Ballet. It seemed to make painfully obvious the inherent difficulty in blending classical ballet with the social, improvisational allure of Latin dance. "Tango Vitrola," the first piece of the night, was much better—a cheeky, battle-of-the-sexes take on tango’s raw origins along the docks of Buenos Aires. That one’s the product of leading Argentine choreographer Alejandro Cervera, and Luna Negra would be well served in working with him again.

They would also be wise, in my opinion, to work a lot more with an emerging talent in their own company, Michelle Manzanales, a second-generation Mexican-American who choreographed a brief piece, "Azucar Cruda" (Sugar in the Raw, pictured above), that I felt was the most honest, beautiful work of the evening. It’s the work of someone still sifting through their tools, and trying to work out a vocabulary, but the group piece evocatively and subtly captured the melancholic rural air of a sugarcane plantation community, in which the relationships between men and women can be as sturdy or as tenuous as the stalks they harvest for a living. I’d love to see what this young talent comes up with next.
- Craig Keller

When a dance company touts its presentation of a show with “tango, mambo and salsa,” you have certain expectations. You picture fieriness. You think passion. Luna Negra Dance Theater doesn’t quite deliver on those two counts. That’s not to say that the pieces weren’t without their merits. "Tango Vitrola" (Tango Phonograph) made
interesting use of a phonograph’s scratching noise to transition between pieces. And it was refreshing to see the role reversal of the costuming, with the women in conservative plain black dresses and the men scantily clad and shirtless and wearing fedoras. But the work does have tango in its title, and it lacked the emotion necessary to qualify as the Dance of Love.

"Allegro con Sabor" was great, with the ladies as the standouts. Guest artist Megan Quiroz (the Joffrey dancer performed en pointe) and Luna ensemble member Vanessa Valecillos had amazing lines while adding a more playful and sexy vibe. Choreographer Michelle Manzanales’s "Sugar in the Raw" went a more somber route and examined struggle. The piece was well executed and its drama was palpable.

The most anticipated work of the night was "CUGAT!" from Luna artistic director Eduardo Vilaro. The piece, tried to convey the excess of pre-Castro Havana, the era of popular Cuban bandleader Xavier Cugat. Having the excellent Angel Meléndez and the 911 Mambo Orchestra perform live certainly helped, and the dancers gave it their all. But it was a bit contrived to have El Comandante dancing onstage to signal the shift in Cuba’s political and cultural
landscapes.

The main problem with the overall program is it’s difficult to watch red-hot dances like the tango through a modern-dance lens. But Luna makes a decent attempt to expand our view of traditional Latin dancing.
- Jennifer Kester

Luna Negra performs at the Harris Saturday 20 and Sunday 21.