I’ve been writing about Neenan since the early oughts. The former Philadelphia Ballet (then Pennsylvania Ballet) star went on to become the company’s resident choreographer for many years, and, as a co-founder of BalletX, he has an ardent following among Philadelphia audiences. A look back at his body of work over the last two decades establishes him as one of America’s leading choreographers.

“I Forgot The Start” and “The One to Stay With,” choreographed by Amadi Washington and Sam Pratt, were the program’s strongest works. The show opened with the Philadelphia premiere of the latter, a bracing and challenging dance that Bodytraffic commissioned and premiered at New York’s Joyce Theater in 2022. The choreographers’ company goes by their grade-school nicknames, Baye & Asa and creates movement arts, project-based dance theater in contemporary, hip hop and African dance idioms. They say their aggressive physicality is a “symptom of our political rage.” They put it to good use in this mood-swinging dance “in response to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, that chronicles the Sackler family’s rise to power and their central role in the opioid crisis.”

Sound design by Jack Grabow began with the 1906 Russian waltz, “On the Hills of Manchuria” and ended with Georgy Sviridov’s “The Snowstorm.” Russian and Eastern European musics from a century ago seem an odd choice, but their militaristic heaviness counterpointed and underpinned the intent of the work, suggesting the collateral damage of the military/industrial complex at its worst. Though hip hop is Baye & Asa’s foundational dance language, their choreography moved through every imaginable dance idiom, reflecting the layers of class, age, and gender the opioid pandemic affected. 

Three of the dancers stare at an underlit white bowl, a receptacle for a constant drip of liquid. In Oana Botez’ dreary street attire, Katie Garcia, Pedro Garcia, Ty Morrison, Joan Rodriguez, Guzmán Rosado, Jordyn Santiago and Whitney Schmanski begin joyfully, dancing up a storm, leaping with knees pointed to the flys and flipping each other up in lifts. A dynamo in white, Tiaré Keeno, moves among them, and sometimes seems to control them. Is she a doctor? A corporate executive? Eventually I came to think she’s the only one not affected by whatever is dripping into the receptacle. Did it imply drugs or money, or both?

One by one the dancers peel away crunching over into different versions of pain or awareness of their condition. You see agitated tours and sudden slumps to the floor. Michael Jarett’s lighting design ends the dance with a lightning flash into the vessel. The message of this dance was as loud as a thunderclap.