When I first met Abigail Child in the mid-1970s, she had just moved to San Francisco from Boulder where she had been studying dance & poetry at the Naropa Institute. Tho Child was (is) a film-maker, the costs of her first independent “feature” film, Tar Garden, had left her without the resources to pursue film-making for the time being, and had also left her with a deep critique of the manipulative elements of normative (or “Hollywood”) narrative. Writing, however, appeared to require but a pen & a notebook and a dancer’s palette is her or his own body, art forms that one might pursue with a minimum of cash.

“The essence of dance is fund raising,” represents the polar position to this, something I once heard Margaret Jenkins, the dean of Bay Area choreographers, bemoan. Sets, costumes, studio space, salaries, touring costs all quickly turn the art of dancing into what is literally a major production. Back in the days when Margy’s dancers were my age, I used to see them around San Francisco in their day jobs. Larry McQueen might well have been the finest male dancer in the City then, but he also managed a copy shop forty hours per week. Dancing can be very nearly as inexpensive as poetry to pursue, but to be such, you have to dance alone.

What then does it mean for a 19-year-old to attempt to establish a dance company? That’s exactly what Braham Logan Crane did three years ago, founding ASH Contemporary Dance, a Philadelphia-area ensemble that is starting to show signs that it just might succeed. The son & grandson of professional dancers, Crane, who has won several awards for his dancing and choreography, such as the Gold Leo at the Jazz World Dance Congress in 2003, starts with some serious advantages. The most obvious is that he himself is a great dancer, a joy to watch. The second is that he knows what he’s doing choreographically, which has enabled him to attract two other great male dancers to the company: Carlos Lopez, ASH’s “permanent guest artist,” whose day job is as a soloist with the American Ballet Theater – he’s appearing in ABT’s Romeo and Juliet in Washington, DC, this week – and Billy Larson, who was the first American ever to win the gold medal in the solo division in the World Tap Dance Championships in Germany in 1998, merely the first of a long list of similar accomplishments. Larson & Lopez, as you might imagine, bring very different skill sets to the company & Crane’s view of choreography, which incorporates elements of jazz, tap, contact improv, modern, ballet & even gymnastics, touches them all.

Krishna & I caught the company’s current show at the Annenberg Center on the Penn campus last Saturday night. We sat far enough back to get a good view of the stage as a whole, which turned out to be the right way to approach it – Crane has an excellent eye for the stage as a canvas & his works have a sense of energy that is boundless. He makes demands of his dancers that would send a bulimic to the hospital – as it is, the seven-work program Saturday used two solo dances by Lopez and one work performed by the ensemble’s training company, ASH Contemporary II, to enable the full company to make it through their four pieces.

The company is at its best when Crane’s choreography follows his personality – lively, humorous, deliberately busy, not unlike the way an R. Crumb comic overpopulates any given frame, with slightly exaggerated gestures that carry the effect forward. Dancers dart about the stage, some being pulled by their ankles, others literally doing tumbling runs barefoot on the hardwood floor, then everyone huddles into a cluster while one woman, then another climb over, a game of King of the Mountain turned into a slow motion version of leapfrog. Using music by Deathcab for Cuties, Suger Rios or Lamb, the effect is often as breath-taking for the audience as it is for the dancers.

Crane is at his weakest, tho, when he tries to single out just one side of his work, as in the case of a modern solo performed by Lopez to Andrea Boccelli’s signature Con Te Partirò, that may have been terrific technically, but aesthetically proved a cliché that reminded you just how young this choreographer really is.

The other element of Crane’s vocabulary that needs to be strengthened is choreography for women – there was hardly a solo moment in the entire evening for female members of the full company, tho they’re all strong dancers (they have to be) & Kara Bason in particular stood out.