MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : MODERN GERSTLER

Conservative in expressive intentions and rudimentary in movement ideas, Tina Gerstler’s brief modern dance program Friday at the Beyond Baroque Center in Venice, remained compelling due to the sense of delirium she brought to her performances of all three works.

Self-absorbed to the point of autism, this locally-based artist (best known for her dancing in Mary Jane Eisenberg’s company) strongly projected the sense of a woman at desperate loose ends in her solo “Nightcap.”

Gerstler danced here as if impelled, as if her actions physicalized engulfing emotions. However her motifs (including liquid baseball-style windups that terminated with her either angrily slapping her hand away or bitterly/ironically blowing a kiss) were definitively expressed in her prologue-in-silence, and their repetition in the main body of the piece (set to music by UB40) added nothing.

Similarly, the slide-show prologue to “Succession” (depictions of women in sculpture juxtaposed to pithy, quasi-biographical phrases by poet Amy Gerstler about women’s lives and roles) made the trio that followed largely redundant. There were some intriguing 2-against-1 formal gambits, some less successful passages involving chairs. However, the dancing served essentially as a gloss on previously defined ideas--though, again, the choreographer’s feverish and strangely isolated intensity held one’s attention powerfully.

The duet “I Do, What Can I Do?,” tried to summarize the breakdown of a marriage. However the satiric, slick-oppressor charades that were assigned to the husband (Frank Adams) scarcely amounted to a role and, as a result, the sympathy-by-default accruing to the suffering wife (Gerstler herself) became utterly devalued. Indeed, if Gerstler can’t get beyond crude, superficial yank-the-woman cliches in her attempts at feminist dance drama, maybe she should stick to solos.