LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : A BLEAK WORLD : THEATRICAL NIHILISM FROM MAGUY MARIN

Maguy Marin is the scavenger queen of French movement-theater--a choreographer who pieces together what passes for dancing from bits of eccentric character-gesture and who assembles grandiose, nihilist spectacle from the flotsam and jetsam of European culture.

Highly picturesque but curiously simple-minded, the three Marin works seen during the Los Angeles Festival also shared one essential creative stratagem: Each placed its emphasis on high-concept theatricality and cheap irony, downgrading dance to mere filler.

Indeed, there were many moments in “Cendrillon,” “Babel Babel” and “May B” that mocked the act of dancing, and one sensed that Marin was far more comfortable making those sequences than the far fewer passages in which she had to approach dance as an expressive or even coherent art.

In a sense, she covered her tracks most successfully in her Samuel Beckett extravaganza, “May B” (presented Saturday by her Compagnie Maguy Marin at the Raleigh Studios). Here, as in her doll-house “Cendrillon” and the campground section of “Babel Babel,” she set a cast of nasty grotesques careening about the stage.

But, by appropriating Beckett’s profound vision of human suffering and resilience, Marin inherited responsibilities greater than merely approximating doll-motion or depicting bourgeois bad taste. And she occasionally made good on those responsibilities, usually by borrowing Beckett’s own methods.

She began with off-the-rack Expressionism. In chalky makeup that made them resemble crumbling statues, her 10 dancers shuffled numbly through a bleak courtyard set, leaving trails and clouds of white powder in their wake.

Periodically, onslaughts of deafening march music forced them into regimented, unison statements of decrepitude. Quieter interludes found them grunting and cackling, fighting and playing pat-a-cake, scratching and reaching into their crotches to remove vermin--all of this very obvious and arbitrary.

Even worse: a birthday party scene in which the dancers impersonated actual Beckett characters: Pozzo and Lucky, Hamm and Clov, the whole stock company. How artistically bankrupt: to assemble the artifacts of somebody else’s body of work as if mere juxtaposition were somehow significant.

And yet, and yet . . . Ignoring Marin’s penchant for endless washes of inappropriate symphonic and vocal music (mostly by Schubert here), the final third of “May B” did supply a true motion equivalent of Beckett’s world--or at least that part of it that deals with his characters as permanent refugees.

In the repeated departures of her rootless, battered indigents and, especially, in one passage where they laboriously helped one another get down off the stage as if crossing some dangerous frontier, Marin at last went beyond facile manipulation (and quotation) to a level of commitment that her three pieces in Los Angeles otherwise lacked. Commitment to movement expression, commitment to developing ideas, commitment to people.