MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : ANGEL AND DOWDELL

Vicki Angel and Annuel Dowdell are post-modern choreographers trying to make formal, reiterative dancing yield expressive implications.

On a shared program, Friday at the L.A. Fringe Theatre downtown, both of them set repeating cycles of cool, structuralist dancing against gritty tape collages.

In “Prairie Song,” Angel abstracted key gestural concepts and central processes from country-and-western ditties. In “Directional Changes,” Dowdell established rhythmic and pantomimic contact with overlapping folksy speeches (on tape) that gave driving instructions to one place or another.

The small, wiry Angel and the statuesque, fleshy Dowdell danced skillfully but their movement distillations emerged far less distinctive and primary as artistic statements than the accompaniments.

So, too, Angel’s group piece “I Went to the Store” physicalized ideas about the connection between food and feelings that were developed with greater invention in a cantata by Robert Harrison, Lisbeth Woodies and Peter Zajonc.

Against a terrific supermarket spiritual, for example, she simply recycled her familiar ploys: bodies lurching out of balance, movements replayed like film loops, etc.

Angel’s well-executed trio, “Fulcrum” (music by Woodies) explored these concerns directly, and more successfully, without any expressive pretext. Her previously reviewed “Underneath” completed the program.