DANCE REVIEW : Collaboration of Percussionist, Dancer

Percussionist David van Tieghem is not a dancer, but he can move with such compelling interest that one understood immediately why his collaboration with dancer Wendy Perron at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) on Thursday extended beyond providing her company with scores.

In Perron’s duet “Divertissement” (set to his music), van Tieghem proved a brilliant counterpart to the choreographer in the contrasts between their cross-purpose dialogue, the verbal meanings of their speech and implications of their movements, and the kinds of movements themselves.

None of Perron’s own dancers in her episodic, quasi-ritualistic “Arena,” set to a sound collage by Perron and van Tieghem, generated as much power.

Costumed like extras in some post-modern Hollywood Babylon epic, Perron, Lisa Bush, Kumiko Kimoto and Michael O’Rourke enacted the abstract, folk-like and dramatic motifs with clarity but with less energy than that of the racing pigeons suddenly released from the wings or on stage by attendants Patty Bice and Rebecca Todd. The work seemed resolutely fixated on cool production values.

In his solo “Message Received . . . Proceed Accordingly,” composed and performed by van Tieghem, the lanky percussionist evoked a child’s joy in the variety of sounds he can get from everyday household objects, toys and discarded industrial rubble.

By amplifying and distorting noises by manipulating dozens of such objects, van Tieghem created a curious mix of Harpo Marx and musique concrete, and intercut that with several pure-movement episodes, such as lip-syncing to a song about a percussionist, or dramatizing the contrast between smooth, broad movement and isolated palsy-like tics and trembling.

Unfortunately, the free-spirited fun was deadly compromised by his reliance upon undeviatingly regular computer-generated rhythms.