Momentum Dance Company’s first major show of the 2003 – 2004 season (at Little Havana’s Manuel Artime Theater, while the Colony is rehabbed) was entitled Hearts, Heroes, Humans and it featured one world premiere and an intriguing sampling from the choreographic repertoire of artistic director Delma Iles. 

The program included two works unveiled earlier this year. Roots Encounter is a striking solo by Momentum’s assistant artistic director, Irmah DelValle, exploring the primitivist, Afro-Caribbean mode favored by her. It premiered at the recent Miami International Ballet Festival and it’s a tour de force for the marvelous Maite Diz Portella. Beginning with her balancing on a funky down-turned stool striking gymnastic poses and then segueing to a dance during which the stool becomes a proxy conga drum, the piece highlights both Portella’s formidable acrobatic skills and impressive ballet technique.

Shadows and Accumulations II we remember in an earlier incarnation (presumably I) which featured two dancers in metallic body suits that gave them a robotic, cyborg vibe circling about like wind-up dolls and occasionally minimally interacting and reeling off flurries of pirouettes. (We think we remember live musicians playing sci-fi music but are not sure.) Now the dancers are costumed in short, black vinyl dresses and it’s definitely performed sans music. Done in silence, especially, it’s a modernist “think piece” that throws you back on your own resources, such as they are, while throwing the technical skills of Danella Bedford and Barbie Freeman into stark relief.

Deservedly a Momentum fan favorite, Brecht Suite, set to a trio of Brecht/Weil songs, oozes Weimar angst, in-your-face pizzazz and romantic disillusionment – besides serving as a showcase for Portella, Freeman and Bedford, the three company dancers that match up with the best around these parts.

2002’s Jungle, set to a smokin’ jazz/funk fusion score by Miles Davis and enlivened by fabulously slinky, slithering costumes by Carolyn Finlayson rendering animal scales and skin in metallic sheen, takes the form of a diptych. It transitions from a primal jungle evocation to (with the addition of a few costume items) a sizzling club scene jazz dance number.

The full-length version of Iles’ four-part The Tyranny of Beauty premiered in 2002, and it’s one of her major works, alternately thought-provoking and deeply moving and goofily sarcastic and entertaining. The first section, “Beautiful/Unbeautiful,” a duet for Freeman and John Keith, operates in a sort of twilight zone between the unaesthetically pedestrian and awkward and the strangely beautiful – calling into question our understanding of both. In the third part, the enormously affecting  “Skin Deep,” Freeman and Danielle Marotta wear disassociating monster masks while dancing one of Iles’ most beautiful composition. Alternating with these serious episodes are two group numbers of madcap parody as company members stagger about uncomfortably in pinching underwear and high heels as the Cesar Franck score throbs and whines melodramatically (“Pour Etre Belle”) and preen moronically with handheld mirrors before the silliness (the point) spills out into the audience (“Mirror, Mirror”). 

The program was rounded out by 1993’s Rain, a group piece featuring hospital pajama clad dancers with flags affixed to their backs (and flopping onto their faces), shimmying, stomping and interacting in whispers to a Phillip Glass score. The one premiere was DelValle’s Black Feeling, a relentlessly uplifting paean to “the Black struggle for freedom.” DelValle has got to be one of the funkiest, deeply subversive choreographers when she lets it rip, but we found most of this piece roughly equivalent, inspiration-wise, to what you might see in a line dance from a Lion King production number at Disney World.