DANCE REVIEW : Pilobolus Arty in Its Fashion

Oh, for the innocent days of 1971. That was when a commune of athletic iconoclasts at Dartmouth decided to re-invent dance.

These brash, boneless and often inspired young things called their unique ensemble Pilobolus. You know, after the sun-loving fungus that thrives in manure and shoots its spores long distance.

Together, the Piloboli created and performed wild and wondrous theater pieces. They may have tended to ramble and lose focus once in a while, but they often staggered the senses with their pictorial vitality and kinetic impossibility.

The pieces could be lewd and crude. They could be exquisitely abstract. They could be oddly lyrical, unabashedly exciting, overwhelmingly funny. They couldn’t be boring--not on first viewing, anyway.

The tangled gang didn’t care much about formal dance steps or gestural continuity or old-fashioned narrative. They were too busy bending their limbs in unlikely directions, too busy stretching the limits of acrobatics. They were too busy elaborating on mysterious folk rituals, exposing the finer points of multiple-body fusion and testing the boundaries of body torture in the name of art.

Often they wore each other as costumes. Occasionally they wore no costumes at all. Skin was in.

Over the years, a strange thing began to happen to the terpsichorean fungi. They became very popular.

They also became rather commercial. They grew older. They joined the Establishment, after a fashion.

They branched out into show biz. They found a new generation of dancers who (shudder) actually looked sleek and suave--like dancers.

Worst of all, they began to re-invent and overembellish the brave new form they had created. In the process, the poor little dears seem to have lost their way. They may have lost their popularity, too.

Tuesday night they opened a 6-performance run under UCLA auspices at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood. The once-adoring masses stayed away in droves.

The evening began with cornball The evening began with cornball nostalgia; that is, with the raunchily gnarled barnyard ethos of “Molly’s Not Dead” (1978). So far so sweet.

Next came a local premiere: “Land’s Edge,” created by Robby Barnett, Alison Chase and Jonathan Wolken in 1986 for the Hartford Ballet. Molly wasn’t dead in this one either.

This turned out to be a rather conventional, rather unsavory, all too literal, hokily costumed dance-drama containing little dance. Exit exuberance. Enter portentous pretension.

The sound track invoked splashing waves and, among other tinkles, Irish jigs. The backdrop suggested a starry night. A boy-girl couple struck waltz poses and did some violent spinning exercises downstage. The two were watched by three men in the background: a tweedledum/tweedledee pair of dandies and a drunken lout.

They all engaged in a lot of mechanical mixing and matching until--swoosh--a pretty corpse was suddenly washed ashore. Enter necrophilia.

Everybody more or less danced with the body. It wasn’t nice.

Everybody did a lot of silent screaming, a lot of pulling and tugging and contorting. It wasn’t interesting.

Finally--surprise--the resident idiot brought the corpse back to life for a rag-doll pas de deux. It wasn’t credible.

Just when it seemed wise, if not safe, to go back into the water, another pretty corpse was washed ashore. The curtain fell, and not a moment too soon.

Life, and death, go on. Get it? In this context, at least one viewer would rather not.

For the would-be piece de resistance , the semi-ambisexual sextet repeated its bizarre distillation of the second half of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” (1985). Significantly, this mishmash listed seven--count ‘em, seven--choreographers plus a director: the august Moses Pendleton.

Five of the participating men wore skullcaps to suggest the shaved heads of medieval monks. One masquerades as a Halloween Mephisto. The female temptresses wore very little. The lusty narrative was sometimes reflected in the rhythmic mime. The Latin text was sometimes ignored, sometimes silently mouthed by the protagonists.

Essentially, this turned out to be an uneven gimmick-exercise about huge storage canisters, which became super-multipurpose props, and about Nikolais-esque costumes which stretched beyond reason and became monstrous dancing blobs.

There were funny cartoon images, here, plus erotic images, dirty-little boy images, clever images, exasperatingly sophomoric images, painfully predictable images. There was much rolling out of barrels, much rolling on in barrels, much popping in and out of barrels. There even was a cutesy love duet for two barrels with brief lives of their own.

There wasn’t much coherence.

The executants--Jack Arnold, Carol Parker, Jim Blanc, Peter Pucci, Austin Hartel and Jude Woodcock Sante--worked very hard. They also smirked very hard.

Somehow it wasn’t enough.