Choreographer Fagan puts on dance party

In the performing arts, an evening such as the one Garth Fagan Dance presented Friday at the Maine Center for the Arts, is called a dance concert. It is made up of a series of choreographies much like a music concert is made up of a series of songs. But if you were in the audience the other night, then you might have felt that, more than anything, Garth Fagan put on a dance party.

In the early 1970s, Fagan made his name working with untrained performers in a style that accentuated intuitive, populist movement, the kind any limber, willing body might do. More than 30 years and an armful of awards later – Fagan won a Tony for his choreography of the Broadway musical “The Lion King” – the Jamaican-born artist has sustained that original appreciation for individual expression and ability while pushing the work to greater levels of detail, sophistication and beauty.

In the 21st century, beauty is not a fashionable word to put on the table when it comes to describing art, but Fagan’s utter delight in form and movement is nothing short of beautiful. A flicker of homage sparked for his mentors Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey, and even for the neo-classical elegance of George Balanchine. But Fagan is an original.

Consider his 1982 work “Touring Jubilee 1924 (Professional)” in which dancers are consumed by a juke-joint beat by Preservation Hall Jazz Band. They frolic, strut, slide and swing using the formal rules of jazz dance while incorporating flirty street gestures. It’s so rare that an audience is actually moved to laughter during dance presentations, but Fagan, who was in the audience on Friday, has a comedic side that is entertaining and amusing – if not amused.

He also understands deep sadness and alienation. “Sonata and the Afternoon,” a forbidden tryst between lovers, was a pas de deux with longtime company members Bill Ferguson and Nicolette Depass. Fagan has said that the dance characterizes the unconsummated love between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, whose music accompanies the performers. But the peasantlike simplicity of the costumes, designed by Fagan, added to both the emotional tenderness and to the sense of forced separation. Ferguson and Depass, who must know this piece on a cellular level, nevertheless danced with uncompromising spontaneity and discovery. At times, it seemed as if their bodies were fused together.

Brahms is Fagan’s favorite composer, and his music resurfaced for “–ING,” performed to the Emerson String Quartet’s recording of the familiar Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet. “–ING,” created last year, was Fagan’s newest work on the program and seemed to be a culmination of the other pieces earlier in the night. As with “Prelude (Discipline Is Freedom),” the paean to modern technique that opened the show, “–ING” featured a segment in which Fagan’s muse and assistant, the insistently lithe and muscular Norwood Pennewell (who has been with the company since 1978) performed alone on an empty stage. Even when no music played, Pennewell implied it. And even when music did play, Pennewell and the other dozen dancers embraced it but were not bound to its obvious beat.

Often Fagan found rhythm and music hidden between beats or outside the beat, and his loose-jointed dancers had an athletic, balletic, earthy strength. Never was that more true than with Keisha Laren Clarke, a dancer so light, so physically emancipated that her draping arm sweeps, full extensions and undulating hips were mystifying.

The evening, one of the most captivating of the MCA season so far, proved it doesn’t really take puppets and props, wild animals and fanciful costumes to create a fantasy world. All it takes is one man’s understanding of the body and of beauty.