By Sima Belmar

FOUNDED IN OAKLAND in 1972, Dimensions Dance Theater celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, no small feat for a contemporary dance company. Under the continuing artistic direction of Deborah Vaughan, Dimensions is a company and a school with a clear mission: to create and perform a fusion of African, jazz, and modern dance techniques as a reflection and expression of contemporary African American life.

In its production of In the Shadows of Our Ancestors ... Mudzimu at Alice Arts Center (March 23-24), Dimensions succeeded in presenting its crystal-clear formal and ideological inclinations. In the opening dance, "Give Way," the dancers' bodies transitioned from African dance vocabulary, through the jazz idiom, into modern dance forms and back again like speakers who grew up in multilingual households. A voice-over mused about the recovery of memory, the restoration of song, and a woman's resilience. In gorgeous and versatile dresses of multiple brown hues by Mario Alonzo (who deserves an award for creating costumes that partner with the dancers rather than get in their way), the company represented a community connected as much by a shared history of African American modern dance (echoes of Ailey and Dunham are visible) as by African ancestry.

Live music predominated in the production. The Bogo Music Ensemble – featuring a concert grand harp, percussion, electric bass, keyboards, flute, soprano sax, and marimba – performed their blend of modern jazz and classical African forms with great alacrity. Ensemble drummers members James Rudisill, Mosheh Milon, Sekou Gibson, Ajayi Jackson, and Baba (Rich) Faye offered a macho skit of one-upmanship before exploding into an audience-pleasing display of percussive play.

An epistolary text in the "Lost Yet Found" section of the dance reflected on loss and recovery. The letter, from one African woman to another, told of epidemics and genocide. Slides of the African countryside, people, and sunsets by Umi Vaughan served as backdrop to the accounting of tragedies. As the central dance of the evening, sandwiched between a powerful opening and a transcendent ending, "Lost Yet Found" felt overburdened. The text was heavy, the choreography looked indecisive in matters of abstraction and narrative, and Bogo's music lost its way, sounding like something behind the doors of a dentist's office or elevator.

Despite the momentary lapse in choreographic consciousness, Dimensions dancers Anisa Rasheed, Gina Dawson, Laura Elaine Ellis, Latanya D. Tigner, Althea Anderson, and Nora Chipaumire, and associate artists Andrea Lee, Elize Selvarajah and Valrie Sanders performed with the unity of a true ensemble. No dancer flagged in the face of a running time of one-and-three-quarter hours without intermission. They performed with aggressive attack and impressive versatility, alternating between speedy rhythmic progressions and agonizing balances. It is a great challenge for a dancer to move with perpetually bent legs and a torso flexed at the hip then suddenly pop onto a straight standing leg and slowly developpé while circling the head.

The final section of the dance, "Mudzimu," was the most commanding, in spite of an unfortunate lighting mishap that took the punch out of the dance's last moments. Chipaumire was the featured soloist, and she took her role seriously and the audience by storm. Dancing out pain, anger, and loss, Chipaumire kept viewers riveted with her fierce focus. When the ensemble gathered behind her as if to buoy her and prevent her from being broken by suffering, she dissolved and emerged, by turns, into and out of their spiraling patterns. Chipaumire's dancing developed characterologically there, and other dancers had moments of character development as well – the seemingly haphazard nature of which led me to question the direction in which the piece was going.

What is most exciting about the Dimensions dancers is their ability to be inside the dance and performing for an audience simultaneously. The individual in many African dance forms is dancing as an expression of self within community, as a component of ritual, toward a religious or social end. The Western theatrical dance tradition is framed like a photograph by the proscenium, frontal and extroverted. Vaughan's dancers appeared comfortable with both aspects of the performance, and the performance acted as a representation of ritual and ritual itself. Rather than spending precious theater time debating the nature of ritual, art, and entertainment, I chose to listen to Vaughan's advice (appearing in a slide of a road sign): "Give way." In other words, yield.