DANCE REVIEW : ‘MODI’ AT THE EILAT GORDIN GALLERY

To a brilliant, intense actor/dancer such as Luis Manuel, the life of the brilliant, intense and doomed artist Amedeo Modigliani might seem a perfect vehicle. Certainly Manuel finds in the story of this peintre maudit (accursed painter) the same themes that illuminated the extraordinary performance pieces he created earlier this year in collaboration with Mel Kennedy.

Like the situation in the terrific Manuel/Kennedy duet “Hands Off,” Manuel’s one-act dance-drama “Modi” (running weekends at the Eilat Gordin Gallery in West Hollywood) is an ‘80s apache-dance in which violent physical/sexual confrontation between a male and female expresses major changes in their characters’ lives.

Like the victims he danced in the Manuel/Kennedy solos “Our Hero” and “Killing Time,” Manuel’s Modigliani is torn by convulsive impulses, his body rebelling against the constraints imposed on it. The concept fits: In fact, Modigliani wrote to Oscar Ghiglia in 1901 about being “the prey of strong forces that are born and die in me.” They are explosively on view here.

But “Modi” is something of a step backward. Without Kennedy, the theatrical exactitude and economy that so artfully steered and enhanced Manuel’s passion in the previous works have been replaced by a sprawling, repetitive and essentially unshaped theatricality.

Modigliani’s two-year relationship with South African journalist Beatrice Hastings (Marilee Frazier) is flung out in raw chunks of emotion, accompanied by snippets of classical and popular music.

But Manuel adds no insight to what increasingly seems merely an assaultive precis of Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”: Self-destructive artist fails at love and consumes himself in art. ( Muse aime, je suis a toi! “) Thus Hastings’ hold on Modigliani becomes little more than simplistic tease-and-bait--but, unlike Kim Pistone in “Hands Off,” Frazier is no match for Manuel in either dance-based movement or dramatic heat.

Finally, from the way Manuel bashes his brushes against his art board, you’d never guess that Modigliani was a great draftsman with an elegant sense of line. The link between Modigliani’s torment and the nature of his legacy is suggested only briefly, when Manuel’s hands cleave the air in the undulating curves of a Modigliani nude.

As always, Manuel incinerates himself emotionally--nobody dancing on any local stage can seem so compellingly dangerous in a role. But “Modi” needs a lot more thought and an equal amount of sifting to arrive at the same purity of form that Modigliani achieved in his painting and sculpture.