MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : JUNE WATANABE IN LOCAL RECITAL

San Francisco-area modern dancer June Watanabe impressed with amplitude, ease and integrity of movement in a solo recital Friday at El Camino College.

She developed witty, mysterious connections between the fixed points provided by Remy Charlip’s whimsical drawings of dancing figures in “Red Towel Dance” (to pianist Robert Haag’s prosaic account of parts of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”). Through superb placement and control in extended balances and slow turns, she conveyed an uncommon evenness of weight and distribution of energy.

In Alonzo King’s moody, primitive “Solo,” Watanabe capitalized on plasticity, on shapes held and broken down and on fast turns in wide circuits. Less challenging was Betty Walberg’s conventional satire of high-fashion modeling in “Black on White.”

Unfortunately, Watanabe lacked sufficient weight of gesture to make her ambitious “Michiyuki”--an adaptation of an episode from a Noh drama--convey the wonted impact of that theater form. Despite her slow comings and goings and dramatic utilizations of Kathryn Mezur’s white, stylized mask, what most impressed was the final image that contradicted weight altogether--her hanging as if a broken puppet.

Watanabe closed the program with the previously reviewed “White Ashes,” a tour de force juxtaposing contrasts between heaviness and lightness, stasis and flow.