Donlavy’s Seven: Color Them Vibrant, Intuitive and Poetic

Samuel Donlavy is an emerging, local dancer-choreographer born to a belief in dance as a vehicle for intimate, personal expression--and intimate, personal reception, too. In a program note for his seven-part “Color Me, HERE” performance at LACE in Hollywood on Thursday, he invited his audience to “color me, what-ever-you-may-like,” and provided plenty of intuitive, poetic choreography to be individually interpreted or “colored.”

Few of Donlavy’s seven dancers looked fully comfortable with his ballet-influenced, technically demanding style, especially the exposed turning balances in extension used throughout the evening. However, each took his advice and colored the dancing so vibrantly that the company projected a thrilling emotional generosity that many of the best known touring ensembles lost long ago.

Of Donlavy’s newest pieces, the “Pretty Man” solo from “Promise,” found Beverly Durand flirting with desire, mocking it, yet becoming painfully ensnared. Donlavy’s own solo, “And in the End, I Fly . . . ,” yielded its secrets less easily but seemed a meditation on freedom (those winged arm-motifs) and enduring a sense of displacement.

The promising trio-in-progress “When Syllables Swallow Whole” looked compassionately at commercial sex using commercial dance cliches intercut with confessional modern-dance solos.

It featured Donlavy, Traci Time and Kim Clark. Donlavy and Time also appeared in older, previously reviewed pieces (“Ever/LAST,” “Papa,” “Pillow Talk” and “On Jordan’s Bank”), along with Ronaldo Bowins, Lena Armstrong and the fabulously gutsy Monica Proenca.