Choreography that's easy to read is not necessarily easy to dance.
New York's decade-old Keigwin + Company opened Thursday night at the Annenberg Dance Celebration in its second appearance there in two years. The troupe gave a concert of four legible works with varying degrees of difficulty.
The closing work, 2009's Triptych (by artistic director and choreographer Larry Keigwin), was the most demanding, and I'd have liked to see more of this caliber from this fine company of dancers, three men and three women.
In sexy black-mesh costumes by Karen Young, they burst from the wings running open-chested, arms trailing as if lunging at an intangible finish line. To Jonathan Melville Pratt's pulsing score, they retreated from the stage and rapidly reentered in successive waves, so they began to look like a company of 60 instead of six.
Dazzling combinations of duets, trios, or full-company phrases, with geometric and architectural effects created by angled limbs, faded to curvy solos and blew up again into mechanical groupings that faced the audience, giving us semaphoric arm signals. Read this, they seemed to say. And if the meaning blurs, that's all right. You get the theme.
