DANCE REVIEWS : MOVEMENT-SPECTACLE ‘GAMES’ AT LACE

The most fascinating thing about “Games,” Friday at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, was how perfectly this new one-act suite of deadly, portentous costume tableaux could synthesize, on alien soil, the key elements of contemporary French movement-spectacle.

Created in Los Angeles, “Games” presented themes, theatrical formulas and even specific images familiar to anyone with a cursory knowledge of the Maguy Marin metier: death as a unifying premise, dance as a minor adjunct to grotesque stage effects, apparel as the key to meaning and movement.

All the masks, mannequins, newly tattered clothes, membranes rent asunder, silent screams and other claptrap of recent French Expressionism that “Games” doggedly unveiled on Friday reportedly served as a theatrical counterpart to poems by Yugoslav writer Vasko Popa. But since the poems were neither incorporated in the performance nor available separately, Popa’s complicity in this turgid charade remained unproven.

Essentially the major “Games” players were composer Miroslav Tadic and designer Julie Keller--both resourceful more than genuinely original and both misused.

Played so loudly that its inherent intimacy counted for nothing, Tadic’s taped score contrasted gritty percussion rhythms, plaintive woodwind or guitar melodies and extended solo/choral vocalises.

In the six-part work’s slow-moving, dimly lit opening section (giant eyes collapsing inward and toppling over) and the slower, dimmer one that followed (three figures emerging with life-size, quasi-human effigies from inside what seemed to be gauzy trees), the moods and textures of the music became the primary creative statements.

Later, Keller’s enormous body-masks overwhelmed the other collaborative contributions. A giant ear with a dancer stuck in it like a misplaced pendant, mammoth flower stalks with dancers’ faces as the blossoms, a tent-like robe encasing two figures: These costumes gave “Games” its hallucinatory style, but at a significant cost.

Most of Keller’s costumes permitted such a limited range of movement that nearly every sequence in “Games” soon grew hopelessly static or repetitive. And her most mobile achievements (the insect predators and prey in the “Rose Thieves” section) turned out to be the least distinctive in design terms.

Paris-born, locally based choreographer Gilberte Meunier assumed responsibility for the idea and also (presumably) the theatrical shape of “Games.” But, whatever her role behind the scenes, her accomplishments on stage Friday added up to little more than feeble, listless task-oriented or mime-based connective movement: new French style replicated and redelivered almost impersonally.

Her capable eight-member company found its only sustained dancing opportunity in “Rose Thieves,” but Meunier’s choreography here amounted to little more than juvenile cliches: birdlike flappings versus runnings-and-rollings with a few folk-dance accents thrown in to acknowledge the impetus of the music. If a subject calls forth so little from a creative artist, why bother?