First Position is dedicated to Tatiana Dokoudovska, the company’s founder and a former American Ballet Theatre dancer, and Todd Bolender, a former New York City Ballet dancer who retired as artistic director in 1995. At their half-century mark, KCB's William Whitener clearly felt obligated to pay homage to its ballet lineage by creating a ballet with a capital B. His company, however, looks vastly more comfortable and interesting in works where pointe shoes are shed and individuality quirky-ness is celebrated.

The most delightfully idiosyncratic dancer of the 25-member group was Matthew Pawlicki-Sinclair. Recently graduated from North Carolina School of the Arts, he performed the virtuoso solo in Twyla Tharp’s 1980 Brahms Paganini, of which artistic director Whitener originated the role and which Brahms’s Variations on at Theme by Paganini serves as the musical whip. Tharp's 15-minute solo as physical endurance test pays homage to Paganini's reputation as a musical maverick. After five minutes and the 20th turn combination, Pawlicki-Sinclair’s head ricocheted sweat. Nonetheless, this long-limbed feline man never lost his cool. Instead he dug into a deeper thoughtfulness and greater risk-taking, carving up the space with soaring, off-kilter, triangulations of his limbs. Why Pawlicki-Sinclair isn’t dancing with a bigger company is curious. Perhaps he wants to be groomed by Whitener, whose formidable career encompassed work with Tharp, during her creative boom years, and with the Joffrey Ballet, when Robert Joffrey still reigned.

Pawlicki-Sinclair appeared again in Donald McKayle’s 2008 Hey-Hay, Going to Kansas City. In a section called “King Alcohol,” with Nadio Iozzo and Christopher Barksdale, Pawlicki-Sinclair played the drunken, slumpin’, sad sack with a method actor’s ability to incarnate a role. Here his loose-limbed languor, especially as he folded over Barksdale’s back like a boneless slouch, spoke of insouciance and turpitude. The rest of McKayle’s bon-bon to the Depression era, to prohibition days, underground jazz clubs, and hip-loosening social dances demonstrated the choreographer’s facility with historically referential dance. But much of Hey-Hay looked like a set piece instead of an exploration of dark and light as heard in this era’s brilliant jazz music, of which songs by Charlie Parker, Count Basie and Marie Lou Williams were used, and in the down-and-out economic reference when dancers warmed their hands over a tin-can fire.

With more dancer-actors like Pawlicki-Sinclair and more imaginative dance scenes, which don't always devolve into flirtatious duets between a man and a woman, the stock in trade quality of Hey-Hay could have been avoided. In the final scene to Count Basie’s Jumpin at the Woodside, 11 couples burned up the floor like they were in the throws of delirium at a speakeasy. At this moment, the dance lost its cartoon quality and roared into life. McKayle delivered the raucous, improvisational spirit of Kansas City’s 1920s jazz swing era, a time when ballet in this country was something unknown and when dancing was done furtively in dark, uncommon places.

Pawlicki-Sinclair