Surprises and Disappointments : Dance and Music Played Second Fiddle to Hype, Trendy Quirks

The hype was terrific. But, as regards dance and music, the festival was a disappointment. That puts it mildly.

Robert Fitzpatrick, the with-it director of this would-be sequel to Olympic achievements, promised a celebration of “the world’s great artists.” It says so right here in the souvenir program. Somehow, I missed most of them.

He also heralded the discovery of “the newest creations.” Perhaps he confused new with trendy and gimmicky.

The posters all over town gave blithe warnings of “culture shock.” There must be something wrong with me. I didn’t see much culture, and, drat the luck, I wasn’t shocked.

There were nude quasi-dancers, to be sure, in Maguy Marin’s simplistic-expressionistic parable of birth and destruction, “Babel Babel.” The choreographic event, a maladroit fusion of Mahler and ‘60s pop tunes, offered much physical and vocal babble about little.

There were dirty words and drag routines and mild multimedia experiments in Michael Clark’s neat anti-erotic indulgences. Puerile piffle.

The dauntless protagonists of La La La Human Steps slammed each other around the stage in repetitive rituals of muscular unisex gusto. In the process, they bludgeoned the senses out front. At least they bludgeoned my senses. There must be a better way to score a point.

There were ugly dancing dolls supplanting the usual romantic humans in the mildly interesting “Cendrillon” of Maguy Marin, staged by the Lyons Ballet. There also was a lot of pretension and musical perversion. A subsequent evening of mixed modernism by the same company tried in vain to elevate eclecticism to art.

Karole Armitage--erstwhile punk princess and media darling--wanted to fuse modern painting with slinky variations on the theme of rock ballet. The inherent ideas, alas, seemed trite, the connection between sight and sound proved arbitrary and the dancing was dutiful.

All was lost. Well, not quite.

Monnier and Duroure could at least capitalize on expressive economy and a cool, sardonic wit in their superficial examination of sexual role reversals. That examination, not incidentally, turned out to be an ongoing festival preoccupation.

The ancient, emphatically familiar rituals of Merce Cunningham continued to exert their fascination. The conditions on this isolated occasion, however, were less than ideal, and it should be noted that we hardly need a futuristic festival to bring Cunningham back, once again, to Los Angeles.

My colleague Lewis Segal expressed admiration that stopped short of ecstasy in his evaluations of Susan Marshall, Muteki-sha and three local fixtures: Bella Lewitzky, Rudy Perez and (in the area of performance art) Rachel Rosenthal. Donna Perlmutter wasn’t exactly pleased with the ethnic stereotypes projected--manipulated?--by Urban Bush Women.

And so it went. Fitzpatrick’s terpsichorean shopping spree had, for the most part, brought us pretty packages with meager contents.

The stress, throughout, was on theatrical glitz, on psychosexual eccentricity and on show-biz chic. If the incipient Euro-Disney impresario cares about a serious classic tradition, about great dance--new or old--or about great dancers, he kept his priorities obscure.

At least he gave us a lot of dance. He gave us very little music.

He devoted seven--count ‘em, seven--programs to the historic aberrations of John Cage, grand old man of a quaintly independent avant-garde. This turned out to be a affectionate acknowledgement of Cage’s 75th birthday, but hardly an earthshaking gesture.

The festival also managed to piggyback three presentations of the Music Center Opera. All, no doubt, would have taken place just as well without official endorsement.

The schedule afterthoughts included an odd “La Boheme” that juggled dull operatic convention with bright music-theater innovation, and a tasteless laff-riot production of “La Cenerentola.” More imposing was a rare, vital, properly brutal staging of Prokofiev’s “Fiery Angel.”

It may or may not be significant that the powers in charge elected to flash English supertitles on the screen above the stage for “The Fiery Angel,” even though the opera was sung in often comprehensible English. For the Swedish-language production of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” however, the festival deemed no linguistic crutches necessary.

Fitzpatrick invoked erstwhile CalArts associations in his only other musical offering, an opus called “Hungers.” John Henken praised the “arty techno-flash” of Ed Emshwiller’s video images and Morton Subotnik’s musical embellishments in these pages. Still, the reviewer found the preview label, “electronic opera,” overambitious.

If Fitzpatrick’s artistic choices were mystifying, his decisions regarding the housing non-shortage turned out to be genuinely, literally, discomforting.

For La La La Human Steps, he utilized the archaic Embassy Theater, which has terrible acoustics and impossible sightlines. For the Lyons Ballet and Compagnie Maguy Marin--both of which require a conventional proscenium apparatus--he chose the awkward, makeshift facilities of the Raleigh Studio sound stage in darkest, drabbest Hollywood.

Here, the audience was subjected to something called “festival seating,” a lazy euphemism for unreserved spaces on overcrowded, narrow, skimpy bleachers.

The heart and soul suffer enough for what we are assured is the art of the future. The back and the Sitzfleisch shouldn’t have to suffer too.

It isn’t nice. It isn’t necessary. It certainly isn’t festive.

Now, about 1989. . . .