DANCE REVIEW : ELGART SHOWS CAPACITY FOR PURE EXPRESSION

Sarah Elgart explores the link between personal alienation and social aggression; there isn’t a choreographer that anybody takes seriously in Los Angeles who displays a more limited range.

Her canny sense of pop trends and, especially, her sullen, emaciated glamour as a dancer have made her a natural for music videos. She’s been a success on the tube, a promise deferred in concert dance. Indeed, the constant changes of camera angle and fragmentation of continuity in MTV dance give her video pieces an interest that she can seldom sustain beyond 90 seconds when working on stage.

Up to now, Elgart has revealed a profound distrust in dancing per se . Instead, her pieces have delivered their simplistic messages about sexual conditioning or psychic abuse through mime signals fastened to a mongrelized, rhythmically feeble jazz-modern base.

But there’s hope: On a largely familiar seven-part program at Theater 2, Los Angeles Theatre Center on Monday, some recent Elgart creations revealed a genuine capacity for pure dance expression.

Admittedly she returned to satiric pantomime in her new flex-and-pose exercise “Fashion.” The men came on strong as the sort of arrogant jocks that Martha Graham definitively savaged more than once some 35 years ago; the women preened and struck the kind of sex-object stances that Mary Jane Eisenberg has ridiculed since the early ‘80s in far better pop dances than this. “Fashion” merely represented an empty reflex.

But in “Deeper Reasons,” to music by Liz Story, Elgart wrung fascinating changes from a sinewy vocabulary of slumps and stretches, expertly piloting her dancers through moments of estrangement and passages of protective contact with others. Yes, everyone wildly emoted as if dancing alone couldn’t carry the piece--but it could, it did. Elgart created movement that was inherently emotional--that needed no mime-signals to communicate. What a relief from all the high-energy pop- mudras elsewhere.

In the newly expanded version of her theater piece “Recess,” Elgart revealed a previously hidden talent for formal development. Beyond the clout of her social premise (school kids treated as prison inmates), this dance here attained a variety of mood and a richness of invention quite inconceivable before--when every Elgart dance had only one thing to say or show.

Compelling chiefly for performances by such intense, distinctive dancers as Youngae Park, Frank Confrancesco and the charismatic Elgart herself, the old cartoon-like pieces flashed by in a textbook definition of diminishing returns.

“Offset” depicted the same brutalization of the young as “Recess” and the same constricting social mores as “Right/Wrong.” “Strategies” sneered at the hostility of male behavior in much the same way as “Fashion” and “Offset” did.

Only the moody trio “Heartbait” (a kind of sketch for “Deeper Reasons”) avoided the hard-edged snap judgment that Elgart formerly adopted as her creative approach. What happens to her now depends on her pursuing opportunities for growth; her talent has never been in doubt, only the nature of her ambitions.

Elgart opened the first of two five-company dance series at the Theatre Center. These series promise a comprehensive overview of local dance achievement: the best, the worst, the most popular and the most obscure. Theater 2 itself takes some getting used to as a dance space--the steep audience section gives nearly every seat a balcony view. But this 296-seat proscenium theater offers a needed alternative to the unsuitable studio spaces forced to serve as showcases for the city’s dance community.