Company B

by Janet Anderson

When Pennsylvania Ballet chose Paul Taylor's Company B to headline its March season at the Merriam, no one could have known that it would be the opening week of a war in Iraq. Company B is Taylor's bittersweet homage to the World War II era with dancers doing the jitterbug and slow dancing to the famous Andrews Sisters' vocals. Superficially, Company B is just plain fun, with guys ogling girls, and everyone grinning and hopping to infectious songs like "Pennsylvania Polka."

But Taylor is not, and never was, a superficial dance-maker. The silhouetted figures of men marching along the back of the stage have always been there in this piece. The Bugle Boy of Company B, who was danced so exuberantly and brilliantly on opening night by Matthew Neenan, has always crumpled to the floor at the end. But in this viewing, it seemed clearer that Taylor was choreographing a giddy, frenzied excitement masking the deaths of the soldiers. This beautifully constructed dance, which plays the two themes of life and death against each other, was well performed, but this viewer couldn't stop watching those young men falling to the floor.

Kevin O'Day created a nifty little dance for four performers called, appropriately enough, Quartet for IV (and sometimes one, two or three ). Every move in this piece is clean and simple and freely moving. PAB's quartet of Dede Barfield, Christine Cox, David Krensing and Meredith Rainey brought joyful ease to the big loopy swinging moves, and savored the odd quirky bits, like Barfield curling up on Krensing's knee like a fragile bird needing protection. Barfield often gets mentally pigeonholed as a white tutu ballerina, but she moved beautifully in this modern dance.

What happened to Jaybird Lounge? This dance was created for Pennsylvania Ballet two years ago by San Francisco Ballet's Val Caniparoli. When the dance premiered, it was a knockout and got standing ovations. What was the dance that PAB presented last weekend masquerading under the same title? The brilliant Uri Caine's musical deconstruction of Bach sounded weak, the stage was so dark most of the time it was hard to see the dancers. The sense of zip, excitement and physical challenge was gone. In fact, some of the really fancy virtuoso stuff was either absent or performed in the dark and not seen. Bring back the real Jaybird please. As the person behind me said, "What was that?"