Los Angeles Festival : TRIANGEL PERFORMANCE INEFFECTIVE

TriAnGel, a company made up of local choreographer-dancers Janet Carroll, Jill Jacobson-Bennett and Young Ae Park, presented several ineffective, inconclusive works at Plaza de la Raza on Saturday as part of the Fringe Festival.

For instance, the power and meaning of Carroll’s “Kahlo” (a collaboration with Lorenzo Rodriquez) came less from what you saw than from what you knew about the life and work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo: the wheelchair evoking the painter’s childhood affliction with polio; the bandage-harness costume recalling Kahlo’s “The Broken Column.” But in her dancing Carroll did not make the imagery very coherent or intense in itself. Still, as the hunted animal in a kind of Yaqui Indian Deer Dance, she was lyric and lovely--surprising the audience who thought that the dance had ended.

Other works proved disappointing for vague, meandering structure and dancing of lightweight impact. Young Ae Park’s “Lost and Found” (danced by Jacobson-Bennett and Anne Goodman) and Jacobson-Bennett’s “Split Image” (danced by the choreographer and Park) explored symbiosis and separation from limited points of view.

Park’s “Mind Is a Vessel (Emptying)” made overheated symbolism out of sweat-suited dancers and a lady in white gauze. Fortunately, the program opened with the buoyant, imitatively playful “On Hinge,” choreographed and danced by all three TriAnGelites.