Philadanco celebrates 55 years, female choreographers, and Lee Daniels

Philadanco had much to celebrate when it opened its winter program Friday night at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater.

This year is the company’s 55th anniversary, as well as the 65th of its school, the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts. It was honoring one of its famous alumni: film producer, director, and screenwriter Lee Daniels. And it was opening a program of all female choreographers of color, called “Our Voices, Our Choices … This Is US!”

Despite delving into serious topics, the evening had a festive mood and a great soundtrack, punctuated by the pieces that opened and closed the program.

It opened with Martha Nichols’ An Acceptance of Necessary Endings, which was both a world premiere and a work in progress that felt fully realized. Set to music by Laura Mvula, the piece is highly colorful and energetic. The movement is loose yet polished, involving the whole body. The piece made the stage pulsate with dancers and made the company look huge. I was convinced they brought out the second company for this one, but in reality it was a total of only 18 dancers, including two apprentices.

An Acceptance asks us to accept the unavoidable endings in our relationships, but the piece could also be enjoyed as one long music video or a movie scene from a club where everyone is a very talented dancer. It’s the sort of piece that would make a hesitant audience member love dance.

However, the music, throughout the program, but especially during this piece, was extremely loud. My ears were ringing during the pause between pieces.

Bebe Miller’s 2001 piece My Science was set to music by Le Voix Bulgare and Led Zeppelin, and focused on duets and relationships, inspired — as the program notes explain — by a biography of physicist Richard Feynman. Danced in simple practice clothes, the beautiful work features most classical steps with straight arms full of energy.

Philadanco also revived alumna Dawn Marie Bazemore’s 2015 A Movement for Five, a touching work set to a variety of composers and about the Central Park Five, the Black and Latino boys falsely accused of raping and beating a white woman in 1989. Bazemore said in the program notes that the topic was as relevant as ever, because of institutional biases against Black men. But it is also timely because the Central Park Five last month sued President-elect Donald Trump, saying he defamed the exonerated group during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bazemore’s piece starts out highly athletic. When the music changes, five men are lined up across the stage dancing together but separately, their movements restricted by unseen boundaries. One, Floyd McLean Jr., rises up to perform a solo stretching the constraints, only to be back on the ground until the five are finally freed and supported.

The program ends on a light note, with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s By Way of the Funk. A work in four sections, Zollar choreographed it to music by Parliament-Funkadelic to celebrate another Philadanco anniversary, the 40th.

This is a jukebox piece if there ever was one, with the songs changing frequently. Philadanco alumnus LaMar Baylor returned to dance a solo alongside Brena Thomas and Leslie Bunkley. They and the other dancers, in black and silver sparkles, put the music in all of us.

Philadanco: Our Voices, Our Choices … This Is US! 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center. $29-$49. 215-893-1999 or ensembleartsphilly.org