DANCE REVIEW : LEWITZKY STILL THE MOTHER OF THEM ALL

At a time when the Los Angeles Festival is congratulating itself on bringing cultural manna to the wilderness, how opportune for Bella Lewitzky to remind us of Californian self-sufficiency.

Lewitzky is, of course, an institution in Los Angeles dance: the acknowledged doyenne , Mother Superior, Queen B. As a result, it’s easy to overlook her capacity for artistic growth and sense of adventure--to forget that this lifelong Angeleno has explored much of the artistic turf claimed by the so-called dance auteurs at the festival, from grandiose movement spectacle to intimate solo portraiture, with notable forays into formalist ritual, music visualization and feminist drama also to her credit.

As Lewitzky proved in a sober, compelling three-part program Thursday at the Doolittle Theater, she was creatively apocalyptic long before Michael Clark; used everyday movement earlier than Susan Marshall; has been influenced by the gallery arts as much as Maguy Marin; can translate the tension and violence of contemporary life into assaultive movement metaphor as powerfully as Monnier-Duroure.

The proof: “Impressions 1” (premiere), “Pietas” (1971) and “Facets” (1986), each of which challenged the prowess of the Lewitzky company in intriguing new ways.

Set to a Larry Attaway synthesizer score that suggested organ tones, xylophonic percussion and the human voice in sweet, airy washes of sound, “Impressions 1” enlisted six women in an investigation of motifs derived from the sculpture of Henry Moore.

Obviously the remarkable sense of volume in Moore’s figures couldn’t be suggested, but Lewitzky’s use of the reclining figure as a central image, along with circular linkages of arms and elaborate gymnastic balances, established intriguing points of contact with Moore’s ideas and imagery.

The dangers in this kind of project are obvious: literal Pageant-of-the-Masters pictorialism, which Lewitzky’s choreography avoided, and a kind of artsier-than-thou piety, which it didn’t. Indeed, though narrator Peter Dennis helped keep the focus of the work on major creative issues and principles by reading from Moore’s arts journals, his presence did confer the passive civility of “Masterpiece Theater” on the dancing.

Though the strain of doing all the lifting occasionally robbed their performances of the calm, centered surety they needed, Lewitzky’s women did float beautifully atop each other’s limbs. And, at times, these grave postmodern sylphides did seem to virtually fuse to the floor, to each other’s bodies, to the air as if carved there.

In “Pietas,” Lewitzky used a vocabulary of intense found movement--running, collapsing, flinching, etc.--to parallel Cara Bradbury Marcus’ soundscore of abrasive mechanical noise. The goal: hard-edged movement theater about the aftermath of war, with the dancers alternately fearful, numb and (in passages based on archetypal Christian images) despairing.

Because of the widening horizons of American dance since the work was made, the new generation of Lewitzky company members may have been more comfortable in this unorthodox non-dance idiom than the original cast. Certainly Claudia Schneiderman’s performance as the suffering comforter/victim had a fierce authority at every moment and her six colleagues also delivered skillful, fully invested performances.

Recently reviewed, “Facets” completed the program, with its bold contrasts in mood and dynamics sharply articulated by Nancy Lanier and Walter Kennedy (the quicksilver first duet), Schneiderman and John Pennington (the weighty, sensuous central section), Lori McWilliams, Kimo Kimura and Kenneth B. Talley (the almost randomly combative final trio).