TERRITORY DANCE THEATER AT PILOT

Territory Dance Theater of Tucson wears its pretensions like a badge of honor. Its seven-part program, Tuesday at the Pilot Theatre, offered literary themes taken from Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein and Julio Cortazar, plus movement influences filtered down from Senta Driver, Trisha Brown and other leading lights of the New York modern dance scene.

Indeed, each idea and technique seemed transplanted from somewhere else (usually the lofts of Manhattan), while nothing reflected its community of origin. However, nearly everything was performed with the same lax, low-energy smugness, as if a nominally avant-garde stance made spirit or even sweat unnecessary.

From the slack, often out-of-shape bodies--and reliance upon mime-gesture, marching, rolling and other non-dance motion--you might have guessed that this was a workshop in movement for actors. But dance dramas depending on emotional values worked no better than pure-movement pieces.

The most focused work, Patricia Cork’s psychological-supernatural “So Foul and Fair” (based on early scenes in “Macbeth”), received only feeble or generalized characterizations, as did Cork’s more diffuse feminist drama, “Cradles for Aaron.” Pat Graney’s two theater pieces, the pantomimic “Three by Cortazar” and the histrionic “The Box,” needed more accomplished reading of their accompanying texts to define promising, if undeveloped, staging premises.

In the minimalist repetitions and cadenced athleticism of Marsha Threlkeld’s “Bonding,” the company mustered a semblance of unity and some discipline. But two lightweight group works requiring more modulation, and more actual dancing, looked dismal: labored in technique and expressively limp.

Curiously, these diversions--Threlkeld’s Hortonesque, pseudo-ethnic “Marketplace” and guest choreographer Bill Evans’ playful look at group loyalties, “Out of Sorts”--represented highly familiar, conventional dance styles. Even so, Territory executed them numbly, as if the choreography was being transmitted to the dancers, step by step, through earphones.

It’s tempting to speculate that Territory Dance Theater just might be good enough for small, rustic Tucson, but it isn’t. Not nearly. Nor is it good enough for Paulette Demos, Thom Lewis and one or two of its other talented dancers. Somebody needs to shake the troupe up, make it drop the virtuous airs and force it to fully realize even this derivative repertory before pushing it into worthier challenges.

The curse of provincialism is the artistic stagnation and wasted potential it engenders--and this message came over more strongly Tuesday than any of the troupe’s chic, borrowed concepts left abandoned like so many stale canapes.