Dance event a one-day wonder

It has been 10 years, and the Yes, Virginia -- Dance choreographic invitational -- for dancers from Virginia and beyond -- is showing no signs of tarnish.

In fact, artistic director Kaye Weinstein Gary has polished up the program and added a few new twists. The program is still just a one-day wonder on the arts calendar of Richmond, but this year it supported two nearly full houses, for a matinee and evening performance at the Grace Street Theater at Virginia Commonwealth University.

An anniversary is always a time of reflection, but Yes, Virginia -- Dance may have taken reflection to the extreme in going back not just 10 years to its own origins, but 60 years to honor the work of modern dance trailblazer Daniel Nagrin.

Shane O'Hara, newly appointed director of the Nagrin Foundation, performed Nagrin's signature solo, "Strange Hero," a study of the American gangster. The work, created in 1948, still has the power to stir an audience, thanks, in no small part, to O'Hara's intensity -- what he calls the "inner performance" -- or focus on the human condition.

The solo protagonist, wearing a suit and tie with an unlit cigarette clamped between his lips, shows us the bold swagger and the pretense of bravado that make this complex character still relevant.

Gary looked to the larger world of theater in two works by her own company: "The Seagull" and "The Morpheus Quartet."

In the former, a work inspired by an Anton Chekhov monologue and set to music that included two versions of a Brahms composition, Tyrone Cooper appears to dance the role of Treplyov writing at his desk, while Gary, with Shannon Hunter and Kyoko Ruch, take on the task of simultaneously dancing the roles of Chekhov's characters and the characters in Treplyov's head. It is an intricate little work, with subtle movement that suggests carefully contained passions.

In a bold step into the future, Gary teamed with theater director Billy Christopher Maupin to present John Glore's 10-minute play, "The Morpheus Quartet," in choreographed form.

Four wonderful actresses, Kristen Swanson, Jacqueline Jones, Sara Heifetz, and Jennifer Hammond, maneuver in choreographed phrases around a set of four chairs while simultaneously speaking Glore's spoken-word canon. We hear the stories of four musicians -- there is a missing cat and a woman filled with road rage while driving in her underwear -- who become the instruments, making music with kinetic phrases while their voices overlap in solos, harmony, theme and variation.

Variety was the order of the day, from Kaye's theatrical adventure to Lacy & Shade's solo set to two sultry Eartha Kitt cabaret tunes; from local artist Starr Foster's "Bridge," in which four women in flowered dresses face off over a kitchen table, to Lorraine Chapman's Marx Brothers-inspired and overtly amusing "I Love Horse Feathers" performed as a trio because of Chapman's injury.

The 10th-anniversary program was rounded out by James Hansen's "frozen," a danced collection of thoughts about cold things, from marble to snow, and Denise Damon Wade's "Gardens of Stone," in which Wade and Kris Turner, draped in Grecian tunics, appear to explore the secret lives of gravestones, while reverently paying homage to the fallen servicemen and women laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.