Dance company La Calebasse makes a promising U.S. debut in Seattle

Seattle audiences have a rare chance to gaze into a crystal ball this weekend and glimpse a future world choreographic master at the birth of his performing career in the United States. Cameroon-born Merlin Nyakam, who started dancing with the National Ballet of Cameroon at 16, then moved to France and joined the avant-garde Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu, has been touring Europe and Asia with his own troupe Compagnie La Calebasse since 2001, but has only now just arrived in America. His performances at the UW World Series at Meany Hall are his first and only scheduled U.S. concerts to date.

In "Récréation Primitive" (2001), the work which launched the company, Nyakam does more than just meld African dance vocabulary with European-style scenic clarity and phrasing, a la Broadway shows. Grounded in a movement lexicon both inventive and organic, it's hard to recall another new company that's come through town with such a distinct and cohesive range of expression.

In the style of butoh, both the dancers' and the drummers' bodies are caked in thick white powder, and they exaggerate and distort their facial features (both on stage and on projected video footage) — but the tone is one of wonderment, energy and exploration. As they slap their ankles in jumps and soar into flying squats, their chalked skin sends up airy powder-clouds across the stage, trails of their mighty feats. The signature posture of the piece — a butt-back, bent-legged walk where the dancers' arms and shoulders refuse to swing and remain welded to the working leg — is so brilliant and brave, so unapologetically ungainly and animalistic, to watch it feels like it must have felt to watch Martha Graham unleash her first strange exaggerated stage contraction last century.

Though only 65 minutes, the piece itself doesn't hold together as tightly as the movement lexicon. The four creation elements (earth, water, air, fire) are Nyakam's organizing principle for the piece, but the real axis for the audience is undoubtedly Nyakam himself, who appears in almost every scene. Sometimes slapstick, sometimes fierce, he carries the show with his physical incandescence and his synthesis of energy and articulation. He isn't yet choreographing for each member of his troupe, and his focus is too broad and sprawling. A mixed repertory evening — where he can devise serious theme-and-repetition explorations of his eclectic movement phrases and musicality — would be a powerful evolution.