Configuration Dance Dance Review

The dancers' easy innate classicism was the first great pleasure of a program presented by Configuration Dance on Tuesday night at Ailey Citigroup Theater. Yuri Zhukov's funny, charming "No Time Jazz" was a close second, along with two oddball acrobatic pas de deux. It is too bad the company, based on Cape Cod, Mass., and founded in 2000 by Joseph Cipolla and Catherine Batcheller, performs so infrequently in New York City.

Members of the Configuration Dance company performing “Awakening,” with music by Aaron Copland, at Ailey Citigroup Theater.

Mr. Zhukov gets six partygoers moving to music by Django Reinhardt, Erroll Garner, Charlie Byrd and others. The dancers sashay onto the stage preening comically for an invisible mirror. Three duets follow, each as individual as the characters. Kirk Henning is a rumpled jazz baby with not much time for his eager girlfriend, danced by Sarah Jane Taylor. Raul Peinado and Laura Feig share a cigar. And sweetly goofy Wyatt Barr works hard to pry Ms. Batcheller from her newspaper. The six form a shuffling, turning line of low-kickers, drink glasses in hand, with Ms. Batcheller gloriously tipsy at the end. Mr. Zhukov and his dancers have just the right light touch and assurance.

Edgar Zendejas's "Crumbling" is as strange as its score by Garma, which sounds like Celtic music mixed with industrial clanking and ardent sexual murmurs. Oliver Wecxsteen stamps, hinges and ballet-turns his way through an opening solo, his expressive hands seeming to mime an abrupt toke every now and then. Ms. Batcheller is his clinging, fast-spun lover. Sasha Janes's "Lascia la Spina, Cogli la Rosa" is a more familiar kind of pas de deux - a lyrical apache dance - but no less appealing for that. Somehow the acrobatic partnering, by Mr. Janes and Rebecca Carmazzi, has a bit of the plangent quality of the Handel vocal music.

Harrison McEldowney's "Enredando Sombras" ("Tangling Shadows"), to music by Luis Bacalou and taped readings of poetry by Pablo Neruda, was an episodic puzzle. The program was completed by a second puzzling group dance, Michael Shannon's "Awakening." The choreography and music, Copland's "Appalachian Spring," suggested a narrative about the life of a community, but only vaguely.