The Brooklyn Rail

A dancer lies prone, arms extended from his body in a cross of light. Another dancer dangles, completely nude, from a bar suspended above this symbolic sprawl. He lets go and drops to a crouch at the other’s feet. Walking slowly upstage toward the dancer’s head, he straddles the motionless body and pulls it up into his own.

The two dancers merge from their separate crucifixions into one being. But not only that, they become a kind of centaur, a creature more than the sum of its human and animal parts. As they amble forward through fog, a mane of hair flips and glints in the edge of a spotlight.

This compelling, dream-like image formed the curious start to the world premiere of Diego Vega Solorza’s Jamelgos at The Joyce Theater. The twenty-minute dance, commissioned for the Limón Dance Company’s eightieth season, closed the mixed bill on October 14. In the program, a note from artistic director Dante Puleio explains how his curation intended to explore male power dynamics and the undercurrents of homoeroticism in both Solorza’s and José Limón’s works. The evening was meant to be an illuminating dialogue between the two choreographers who were born generations apart in the same region of northern Mexico.

Unfortunately, the rest of Jamelgos failed to match the mystical power of its opening sequence. Even worse, the programming of Limón’s The Emperor Jones alongside Jamelgos, however homoerotic and topical in its tale of a criminal seizing power, lacked deeper connective tissue. While Jamelgos struggled to reach any conclusions, The Emperor Jones came away heavy-handed, not to mention extremely dated.

When more dancers emerge in the wake of Solorza’s mythic creature, they don blonde ponytails from their heads and the back of their hips. Rolling onto the floor, they pose in opposition to the dancer nearest, all elbows, knees, and backbones. The identical, androgynous costumes by Julio César Delgado eschew gender but embrace skin, with straps and harnesses in the style of sexy gladiators. In battle-like tableaux, some appear ready to strike while others have fallen.

As the dancers move faster through phrases of sharp poses and guttural breaths, the unison calisthenics evolves into controlled thrashing. If this were a short commercial or music video or an activation inside a gallery, it might be enough action to be transporting without some kind of arc. And while the efforts of the six dancers and lighting designer Corey Whittemore are certainly virtuosic, the sustained repetition doesn’t accumulate or find a satisfying climax in this proscenium setting. Ebe Oke’s looping electronic score, with its uninspired nineties MIDI sound, doesn’t help either.

The final moments coalesce the dancers into a human pyramid, a sculpture of bodies that could be read as warring or titillating. Are they the bronze warriors of memorials or participants in an orgy? Like the shifting Christian and pagan iconography in the opening section, the ending draws strength from the ambiguity of its imagery.

Solorza is the rare choreographer who is represented by a gallery, Llano Arte Contemporaneo. In December of 2024, the gallerists of LLANO used their booth at Art Basel Miami Beach to focus solely on objects from Solorza’s dance Basoteve. Like the live work, the props on view, which included saddles made for two riders, explored a traditional rite of passage that prizes masculinity.

In Jamelgos, Solorza is again playing with the boundaries of conservative, binary cultures. The title of the work also delights in multiple meanings. The Spanish word “jamelgo” translates into English as a nag, a pejorative for a female horse in poor shape or a person, also often female, who harasses you with complaints. But these witty conceptual components dangle the promise of something more, whether erotic or just strangely heightened, that never arrives.

On the other hand, Limón’s The Emperor Jones, performed with full commitment by Johnson Guo, lands as a didactic caricature even though the production has just been freshly reimagined for this season. The dance, created in 1956 after a 1920 play by Eugene O’Neill, seethes with lust and greed. Guo lurks uneasily, a pistol bouncing awkwardly against his inner thigh as he splays his legs on an enormous chair center stage. Suffering from a siege of memories, he grapples with unseen foes and more suggestively with The Man in White, who straddles his chair and forces his crotch into Guo’s face before eventually unseating him. The updated setting, changed from a tropical island to a city, the move away from black face for the title character, and a mixed gender cast, are necessary improvements. And yet, The Emperor Jones remains a relic. The emotive movement vocabulary leans into melodrama rather than complexity, and any sexual tension between the two leading men is mostly superficial and left undigested.

While queer identity propels Solorza’s art, Limón’s enduring works are more concerned with the geopolitical forces of his time: from the Spanish colonists to the Mexican Revolution that forced his family to immigrate to America; World War II, which conscripted him into service to the trials of the House Committee on Un-American Activities that followed it. Traitors, tyrants, and biblical characters people his dances. Though I do not doubt these two artists could have had fascinating conversations about their homeland, conservatism, Catholicism, and other toxic forms of masculinity that most likely kept Limón from being more open about his sexuality, I am not sure Jamelgos and The Emperor Jones give an audience the greatest insight into that hypothetical artistic communing.

The miss in this programming was magnified given the spectacular evening I witnessed during the company’s Joyce season last fall, which included the world premiere of Kayla Farrish’s The Quake That Held Them All along with Limón’s The Traitor. While Farrish’s background differs significantly from that of Limón, there was common ground in the seeds of her movement vocabulary—which pushed the impulses and fall-and-release technique of the dancers to ever more dizzying relationships to gravity and one another—and in her unflinching take on migration and mutual aid. I walked away from that performance awed by the talent of the current dancers, surprised by how Farrish’s complex chain of movements and crowd work translated so well into their bodies and repertoire, and curious what Puleio would program next.

Although this season did not hit as deeply, I remain interested in how Puleio will continue to forge connections among young choreographers, Limón’s work, and the stunning dancers of the company. My curiosity piqued, I look forward to seeing more of Solorza’s work in another setting.

Of the works presented on this eightieth anniversary season, Chaconne got the celebratory assignment the most. Originally performed as a solo, the ten-minute work was reimagined for a multigenerational cast of company members, alumni, Limón2 members, students, and family.

With John Marcus on the violin, the large ensemble brought the Spanish flavor to J.S. Bach’s “Chaconne” from Partita #2 in D Minor. In sweeping port de bras, wrists met overhead with flamenco flair and opened wide as if to gather up the horizon. Legs dipped in deep lunges and swung across the body in bent knee attitudes. The unison effort from such a range of perspectives and bodies felt sacred. In the Limón version of church, they gathered as a diverse congregation, coming together once again for a hymn.