DANCE REVIEW : ‘DANSCAPE ‘85’: MAKING THE ROUNDS AT CAL-ARTS

The novelty of “Danscape ‘85” comes from the experience of standing in the center of the CalArts Modular Theatre for an hour and watching a performance by the CalArts Dance Ensemble circle around you on raised platforms backed with large projection screens.

On those screens, abstract animation sequences by Jules Engel, Dorne Huebler and Adam Beckett establish a quick pulse and a textural variety reflected in both the mostly taped electronic sound score by Larry A. Attaway and the bite-size dance episodes choreographed by Cristyne Lawson and members of the ensemble.

Where you stand in the room determines what you can see, for many of Tim Goecke’s platforms are so low that the dancers are blocked from the view of anyone except the spectators closest to them. Thus, “Danscape” is, in a sense, like “Tamara”: You can’t see everything in a single visit and who you follow may determine the quality of the experience.

This reviewer stuck close to Rebecca Wright on Thursday and thus had a splendid time. Wright used to be one of the principal assets of the Joffrey Ballet and, after that, served as a underemployed soloist at American Ballet Theatre. In the big barefoot ensembles Thursday and in the classical/gymnastic passages that she danced on pointe opposite the cooly proficient Laurence Blake (her co-choreographer), this tiny, fleet, commanding woman again exuded technical suavity, unforced versatility and luminous star power.

Lawson generously placed Donna Wood’s dancing all around the room, so everybody managed to get a good look at the Alvin Ailey company’s former prima as she lent her radiance and sinewy stretch to solo rituals of introduction and leave-taking--as well as a blazing tango trio (with Blake and Rebecca Steuermann) that Attaway set to what sounded like variations on “Hernando’s Hideaway.”

Unfortunately, Rebecca Bobele’s big opportunity--a trio with Marvin Tunney and Kurt Weinheimer--took place in a far corner of the room and remained out of this reviewer’s view. But later Tunney and Weinheimer turned up nearby in a quasi-combat duet full of intriguing, if undeveloped, ideas taken from folk dancing and archaic sculpture. It displayed their notable athletic prowess but, curiously, never drew from them any hint of emotional commitment.

Despite its sense of spatial adventure, “Danscape ‘85” remained conventionally linear in structure and vocabulary. The concept of simultaneity was toyed with but never significantly explored, and only at the end did stage and screen imagery become truly integrated--through exchanging live dancers for their video facsimiles. Elsewhere the animators’ adroit geometric metamorphoses and refractions of liquid color merely punctuated the dances, suggesting other forms of motion than the highly familiar ballet, social- and modern-dance idioms in use on the platforms.

As a slick, expensive multimedia collaboration, “Danscape ‘85” reeked of an all-too safe and insular expertise. Except for the visibility problem, the level of craft stayed faultless, but beyond demolishing a very few, very minor expectations about how an audience perceives dance, it succeeded only in confirming how remote the Valencian landscape has become from the frontiers of innovation.