Nothing dates like technology. The video effects in the Kit Fitzgerald film that opens “Max Roach 100” at the Joyce Theater — a centenary celebration of the great drummer, composer and activist — are clearly from the 1980s. (Remember Max Headroom?) The performances of Roach that the film preserves, however, are timeless.
There he is, seated at his drum set, that American invention of the early 20th century, a jazz innovator handling the polyrhythms of several African drummers at once. There he is, proving his virtuosity by limiting his tools, playing nothing but a hi-hat in the manner of a hibachi chef. The video effects, making his drum sticks splash a rainbow, suggest his range of tone and timbre. But they don’t come close to matching him.
What’s thrilling about the dancers who perform live in “Max Roach 100” is that they rise to Roach’s level. This is a fitting tribute and a hell of a show.
The tap dancer Ayodele Casel follows the film and raises the bar. The stage is set with a tap floor surrounded by lights and a clothes rack. Casel enters, chooses a jacket from the rack and sits to put on her tap shoes. Then she warms up a bit, testing out the various tones of the floor with her close-shave footwork. An artist prepares.
What she’s preparing to do is crazy. The track she has chosen is one of the duets Roach recorded with the free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Improvising on top of that is like dancing on top of a volcano. Casel makes it look easy — floating, sliding, spanning the stage as much as Taylor does his 88 keys. She looks prepared. She looks liberated.
It’s not just that she answers the sounds of Roach and Taylor. She turns their duet into a trio, a conversation between the living and the dead. Listening hard with her whole body, sometimes she follows faithfully. More amazingly, her free rhythms sometimes alter theirs, so that they seem to be following her.
For audience members, it takes a lot of concentration to keep up with this adventure. Lighting by Serena Wong shrewdly provides visual variety: squares of light, shadows reminiscent of Fred Astaire in “Swing Time.” And Casel leavens the difficulty with wit. To show that she’s aware that this kind of music could go on forever, she has the clothes rack and lights exit before she’s finished, pulled off by unseen strings. On Wednesday, when the music was most cacophonous, she held her ground with the most basic time step.
Casel makes it tough for the other artists on the program. But the hip-hop master Rennie Harris answers the challenge with “Jim Has Crowed.” He takes on the more activist side of Roach, choosing a track that combines Roach with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and staging a protest.
To crowd noises (“Stop killing Black people!”), a dozen or so dancers from Harris’s company, Puremovement, mass like protesters facing an unseen authority. Then Roach’s drums kick in and we get the pleasure of synchronicity, footwork that perfectly tallies with Roach’s rhythms.
Harris tempers this pleasure with skepticism about how much of King’s dream has been fulfilled. The dancers flash Black Power fists and windmill their arms and even spin on their heads, but they keep rolling backward like tumbleweeds. After three men are shot, three women open their mouths in silent screams and rotate like lights in a lighthouse. Silent screams are usually an aesthetic error. These are justified.
The program saves the biggest for last. For “Percussion Bitter Sweet: Tender Warriors,” Ronald K. Brown and Arcell Cabuag combine two companies — Brown’s troupe, Evidence, and Malpaso, from Cuba — and take on Roach at his most Afro-Cuban.
This may be the biggest Brown dance ever, but it’s a fairly generic one and a little blandly tender. Unlike in “Jim Has Crowed,” women are underused, and too many of the dancers, and not just the Cubans, only approximate Brown’s potent style, substituting blurriness for its loose grace. They sap the choreography of much of its kinesthetic charge.
But they do it with love. And when they switch from sleeveless dashikis and full-skirted dresses (by Ibiwunmi Omotayo Olaiya) that look like Christmas wrapping paper in Pan-African green and red into spiritually pure white, and dance the steps of Obatala, a Yoruban orisha, or spirit, it feels like the ancestors have arrived. It’s easy to imagine Roach looking on with pride.
Max Roach 100
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.
