Dance at Wolf Trap, Better Than Live

Steel yourself, though: The PBS broadcast of "Dance in America: Wolf Trap's Face of America," airing at 10 p.m. on Channel 26, has zero glitz factor -- unless you count the sparkling tropical beaches or soaring rock faces featured in its dance tribute to various national parks.

Yes, this is dancing on sand, on peaks and in caverns, in a 90-minute compendium of highlights from Wolf Trap's "Face of America" commissioning project, which began in 2000. That multimedia effort included high-definition films of site-specific dance performances at Yosemite, Mammoth Cave and Hawaii Volcanoes national parks, among other locations, which were screened alongside live performances on the Filene Center stage.

The good news is that the broadcast, part of PBS's "Great Performances" series, is far more eloquent than the actual performances ever were. It has what the often scattershot live shows lacked: a focus. Along with the photography, which is as spectacular as you'd expect it to be, what this program offers is an illuminating look at how a dance is made, and at the intriguing and varied creations of some of the non-celebrity journeymen of the modern dance world: Donald Byrd, Elizabeth Streb and Doug Varone.

The series set out to show "the human side" of the national parks, says Wolf Trap President Terrence Jones. To do this, he matched up choreographers with the parks to create a work on site that expressed something about the natural beauty in human terms. A plum assignment, to be sure, but what's especially interesting here is the process that some of the artists went through to connect with the landscape, to evoke historical events and to align this job with the deeply personal, even spiritual side of their own art.

"I hope they see something deeper than just a cellophane skirt and a coconut bra," said one member of the Halau O Kekuhi company of Hawaii, who performed sacred indigenous works on the lava flats at Volcanoes National Park. "I hope we portray the story of our goddess correctly." This segment is one of the broadcast's loveliest; these traditional hula dancers and chanters, wearing bright, billowy skirts and padding their bare feet gently atop the black ash, are all about timeless continuity.

The body beautiful is on view in Donald Byrd's work at Virgin Islands National Park and Coral Reef National Monument. Dancers from his company, the Group, loll in the waves and strut in the surf with unvarnished glamour and chiseled, godlike physiques. But the context is one of pain as well as beauty: The island of St. John was once home to sugar plantations and slave labor, providing a deeply emotional thread for Byrd, an African American.

On the anti-glamour side of the spectrum, Streb, known for her thrillingly athletic work with trampolines and bungee cords, and Amelia Rudolph of Project Bandaloop, which combines rock-climbing and dance, give persuasive voice to a grittier view of dance, one of muscular rigor, risk and white-knuckle fear. Watching her dancers belly-flop from a trampoline onto a mat in the sand at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk, N.C., Streb, with her trademark Mr. Magoo glasses and coarsely chopped red hair, speaks movingly about the connection she feels to those pioneering airmen. "They had to break all those rules," she says. "I feel very much akin to that way of thinking about invention: the belief in the impossible, or the un-done thing."

Varone's suite of dances at Kentucky's Mammoth Cave is the most fruitful of the collaborations -- and he also has the best musical accompaniment in the brokenhearted vocals of Patty Loveless. Varone's interest in filmmaking shows: His relaxed but emotionally pungent choreography -- like Appalachian folk dance tinged with postmodern anxiety -- translates best to the screen.

"How I find my way to an audience," he says, "is to make them feel." It's a statement that sums up what is best about this program's view of dance -- you take away from it something more lasting than the usual TV dance show's eye-candy effects of sequins and skin.

Dance in America: Wolf Trap's Face of America (90 minutes) airs tonight at 10 on Channel 26.