DANCE REVIEW : ELGART’S ‘LOVELETTERS’ AT LOYOLA

Sarah Elgart’s choreography has always been notable for its provocative contemporary edge, the identification with outsiders in our society and a fusion of pop, modern and jazz vocabularies.

But Elgart’s growing success in commercial music-video choreography has paralleled the coarsening of her powers as an artist.

Punchy and unmodulated dance-by-the-yard, crude transitions, relentless reiteration of the obvious, and the fatal confusion between copping an attitude and expressing an idea: All this is now her stock in trade, tricked out in the fashions of the moment.

She hits bottom with “Love-letters,” an episodic, half-hour, Neo-Expressionist essay in cartoon feminism introduced at Strub Theatre, Loyola Marymount University, over the weekend. Certainly she and her company have never done anything as dreadful as the sequence where “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater” accompanies a smug but inept speech-and-motion charade about marital discord.

Elgart plays the non-dancing role of the wife, placed on a pedestal by her (presumably) pumpkin-eating husband who reviles and threatens her. Their confrontational exchange of text lines is echoed by the eight-member corps, with the vocal accusations and milling about continuing endlessly without development, as if this were an exploratory student-workshop improvisation.

It never gets much better. The premise of “Loveletters”--women as abused, hip-swinging bimbos; men as abusive, muscle-flexing jocks--was definitively expressed 30 years ago in the prologue to Martha Graham’s “Clytemnestra” and has been recycled ever since. Elgart has nothing new to contribute other than the incidental embellishments of ‘80s body language and one dubious truism used as a sub-theme: that men classify all women as madonnas or whores.

Not only does “Loveletters” never seriously examine these great tottering cliches, it exploits them for cheap thrills, using the abuse of women as a hook, much as the abuse of children powers Elgart’s familiar--and far better--”Recess” on the same program.

Obviously, you can involve an audience by showing physical mistreatment, but by now the pain quotient in Elgart’s work has merely become a glutting effect--one that reoccurs with the mindlessness of a mad-slasher movie.

Though Janet Carroll displays steely authority in a brief solo, the energetic, dedicated Elgart company can’t make “Loveletters” more than a hollow and deadly rehash of second-hand concepts.

What’s new in the work is the eclectic, propulsive Charles Bernstein score, the striking doorway setting by Stephen Glassman and Ajax Daniels, the satirically heightened yet stereotypical street wear by Lisa Jensen.

What’s not new is the sense that Elgart is stagnating, that she is mouthing rhetoric with empty vehemence and is fast becoming the resident windbag of Los Angeles dance.