A Lion's Share of Dance.

• Author: Durbin, Paula

THE DANCE WORLD is a jungle where only the fittest survive for very long. Among the superior beings to have emerged from this Darwinian struggle is Garth Fagan, a Jamaican-born choreographer who weaves the supple syncopation of Africa and the Caribbean into all the mainstream concert disciplines. Recently, he made the successful leap to commercial show business.

Now Fagan is being lionized on Broadway for his choreography in director Julie Taynor's musical version of the Disney animated film The Lion King. The hit won Fagan a 1998 Tony Award and Disney highest praise.

"Thanks to Garth Fagan," said the New York Times' Anna Kisselgoff, "the entire show dances in The Lion King.... The range of styles is wide, from Caribbean carnivals for spectacular processionals to lyric arcs for leaping dancer-gazelles."

Fagan's original triumph resulted from fearless vision and a gamble--on the non-dancers who wandered into his classes at an inner-city community center in Rochester, New York, and wound up defensively dubbed the Bottom of the Bucket But ... Dance Theater. The students climbed up over the top into a postmodern and multicultural company that has pushed virtuosity to its limits. Obviously, the name had to evolve into something more suitable too, and the troupe was recently rebaptized Garth Fagan Dance. Without even the word "company," says Fagan's spokesperson Bit Knighton, "The name itself moves."

Fagan's own first performances were in Latin America with the Jamaican National Dance Company. When his Oxford-educated father sent him to college in the United States, Fagan added Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon, Martha Graham, and Alvin Alley to the list of masters whose styles have merged into his singular language. But to say Fagan's dancers have ballet limbs, African-Caribbean torsos, and the weightedness of modern dance is to define the idiom too narrowly. This choreographer will not be pinned down. As his...