Dance review: Leaping into spring with Shapiro & Smith

Red flowers open and close Shapiro & Smith Dance's current concert, "Next Steps." Emblems of passion, the flame-like blooms represent, and honor, company co-founder Danial Shapiro, who died in the fall of 2006. But the show isn't a maudlin affair.

Like the short film celebrating Shapiro's life that closes the concert, "Next Steps" looks both forward and back, with dance works that reflect the company's trademark rigor, poignancy and joy.

In the film, it's also clear that Shapiro embodied, if not originated, the fierce physicality and gestural humor that lives on in Joanie Smith's two premieres.

In her solo "Flower," Smith mimes a gamut of emotions -- from wonder and silliness to pain and fear -- to her silent partner, a rose on the floor. In her new light-hearted work for the company, "Miniatures," that gestural vocabulary becomes a game in which the men (Mathew Janczewski, Eddie Oroyan, Ned Sturgis) toss and catch an invisible ball.

"Miniatures" also includes vignettes of riveting energy fueled by motion. Oroyan petulantly pecks at Maggie Bergeron with a delightful little leap and kicks. Janczewski and Kelly Drummond Cawthon drill through a duet resembling a highly abstracted tango. A trio with Janczewski, Cawthon and Laura Selle Virtucio features lithe, sassy hip sashays.

The partnering is breathtakingly immediate and emotionally absolute. When these dancers hurl or fling themselves at each other -- often at precarious angles -- they are clasped in holds as firm as superglue. So when Cawthon, during a lovers' quarrel with Virtucio, arcs backwards off the steps and must catch herself, the chasm between the two seems all the more devastating.

In Shapiro and Smith's 1996 "What Dark/Falling Into Light," inspired by the Holocaust, that partnering style allows for tender sensuality, is a source of strength and expresses desperation. But what begins as a work of haunting, stringent beauty becomes a Hieronymus Bosch-like Hell as the dancers -- wearing only skin-toned briefs, and bathed in a sickening yellow light -- shake, contort and heap themselves into piles of broken humanity.

Before Shapiro's death, he and Smith decided to mentor a company member in the choreographing of a new work. Bergeron's "Accidentally Walking Through Nothing" is the first product of that effort. A trio for Oroyan, Virtucio and guest dancer Sarah Baumert, the work has a lyrical flow created by running, lifting and rolling, punctuated with small hand movements, shoulder touches and lunges. Pretty but unprepossessing, the work still needs to find its edge, or its core.

Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities dance critic.