DANCERS AT MONDAY CONCERTS : THREE’S COMPANY SHARES PROGRAM AT MUSEUM

San Diego-based Three’s Company seemed afflicted with a severe case of superficial chic in a dance program shared with violinist Erica Sharp and trombonist Miles Anderson at the County Museum of Art on Monday.

The dancers--Nancy McCaleb, Jean Isaacs, Faith Jensen Ismay and guest Denise Dabrowski--looked best when playfully exploring abstract, formal qualities of movement. Whenever they attempted to embody narrative or social meanings, their dances turned slick and empty.

To atomistic fragments of sound from Cage’s “Duo for Violin and Trombone From the Concert for Piano,” Isaacs established both a slow tempo and a concern with weight--the same subjects explored in “White Knight and Beaver” (set to a score by Martin Wesley-Smith), which followed without pause. Both works were choreographed by Isaacs and McCaleb.

Laboriously pulling at a paint roller, Isaacs slowly traversed the stage, running the roller across the three other women’s costumes. They then crawled across the floor, rising ever higher only to collapse again. But at the end, the four parodied the whole concept of weight by outrageously miming a group of bowlers.

The creative peak of all this was Isaacs’ central stop-and-go solo, which inventively adapted a limited set of movements to increasingly animated live accompaniment by Sharp and Anderson.

Ambitions rose higher in Isaacs and McCaleb’s duet “Gurney,” inspired by an elderly couple who committed joint euthanasia. However, the chic costumes (black trousers, black suspenders and white tank tops) and showbiz-style symmetry of poses and movements looked too mannered to convey any sense of conviction or connection with such sad events.

Similarly, in the dramatic solo “Illuminata” (choreographed by McCaleb), Dabrowski’s eloquence of line, clarity of shape and balletic weightlessness made the unspecified suffering--hands to temples, bent and twisted body shapes-- look all too languid and glamorous.

Finally, McCaleb’s absurdist group piece “Osirian Fields” combined abstraction with heavy-handed social commentary, setting the dancers in fashion model and broken puppet poses to speech rhythms of such taped sentences as “I don’t want to” or “I don’t know what to do.” Such caricatures seemed too easy marks for satire.

The musicians at this Monday Evening Concert event had two solos. Sharp played Salvatore Martirano’s mini-concerto “Sampler: everything goes when the whistle blows” (composed in 1985 for amplified violin, synthesizer and computer) with punchy drama and lyric expressivity.

Anderson played Dorrance Stalvey’s “Three Pairs and Seven,” which he commissioned from the composer, impresario of the Monday Evening Concert series, with secure, wide-ranging technique, including a deft exchange of various mutes.