COMPOSER STEARNS

The experimental-music series at Los Angeles Theatre Center goes by the name of Quantum Leap. That’s exactly what locally based composer-synthesizer player Michael Stearns provided on Sunday--a giant leap. Backward.

Aided by the five-member M’Ocean Dancers (catch the pun?) and the projected photographs of Sherry Black, Stearns took a large audience on a voyage back to the ‘60s, to the days of Profound Musical Statements in the form of grandiose cathedral chords surfacing out of an endless electronic white-noise whoosh. His opening solo, in fact, was titled “Whoosh.”

In two segments, Stearns provided background for a fast-paced survey of Black’s nicely composed images of mountains, trees and, in endless abundance, crystals photographed under polarized light. All related, no doubt, to the five large illuminated crystals on stage.

M’Ocean leader Susan Harper (Stearns’ wife) and her ultra-serious dancers offered solos and ensembles with such heavy titles as “Nascence,” “Genesis” and “Voices,” utilizing every cliched movement of the period: anguished writhings, slitherings under gauze shrouds, ceremonial processions, slow-motion reachings for the sky.

All pleasant and harmless and, in the end, shallow. It’s one thing to act and speak cosmically (“Hovering on luminous threads we hear the weightless stardance call,” Harper writes), and quite another to communicate same in a fresh and meaningful way.