To return to something after many years and find it exactly as remembered can be comforting. When I attended Complexions Contemporary Ballet at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, more than a decade had passed since I had last seen the company. I found little evidence of change, which wasn’t what I had hoped.
The dancers, though new since 2011, were like their predecessors: toned exemplars of technique, stretching without strain as far as bodies can stretch. The choreography was also as before: shapeless, empty, often inane. Not a surprise, but still disappointing.
Tuesday’s program, which began the second of the company’s two weeks at the Joyce, had the season’s premieres. One was the closer, “Endgame/Love One,” by Dwight Rhoden, who founded the troupe in 1994 with Desmond Richardson. Both men still serve as artistic directors, but Rhoden, as principal choreographer, is the main author of the company style.
It’s not that Rhoden’s work is in bad taste, exactly. That could be fun. It’s more like it has no taste. “Endgame” is set to a mixtape of recent hits by the likes of Drake and Post Malone. Those tracks and the sparkles in the costumes promise a party, while Kendrick Lamar’s “United in Grief” introduces deeper emotion. But the choreography is deaf to both dance-music drive and Lamar’s profound language and flow. The music, as was common in Rhoden’s work 10 years ago or 20 years ago, is a mood overlay for randomly inserted ballet tricks, flexibility displays and perfunctory embracing. Even the dancers’ clapping lacks rhythm.
Large swaths of “Endgame” seem interchangeable with parts of the program opener, an excerpt from “Snatched Back From the Edges,” which Rhoden created last year as a resilience-through-the-pandemic piece. I can only assume that such consistency is appreciated by the Complexions fans who filled the Joyce on Tuesday, whooping for the tricks and giving “Endgame” a standing ovation.
The season’s other premiere, Jae Man Joo’s “Serenity,” is indeed serene. Light rises on Thomas Dilley and Vincenzo Di Primo holding hands, staring into the distance, and that calm is maintained as they dance side by side and take turns dipping and lifting each other or showing off a little in solos. Dilley and Di Primo (also standouts in “Endgame”) have much to show off — gorgeous arabesques, spinning-top pirouettes — and Joo’s composition, while not memorable, lets them exhibit their skills cleanly with a touch of tenderness.
The evening’s most engaging choreography by far, though, is the company premiere of William Forsythe’s “Slingerland Pas de Deux.” It’s an exaggeration of a classical duet, amping up the courtly flourishes. Joe González is clearly the capable cavalier, in service to his ballerina, Jillian Davis (who’s taller than he is), and as he supports her by the hand or waist, there’s always some tension or drama in the connection between them.
On an all-Forsythe program, I might have grown tired of this Mannerist mode and its limitations, but on a Complexions program, it was rejuvenating. One way of describing Rhoden’s work is as knockoff Forsythe, skimming the empty excess and missing the underlying logic. But the logic is there in “Slingerland,” a lesson for Rhoden and his audience.
Complexions Contemporary Ballet
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.
