Dance and Music Reviews : Eisenberg Company at the Japan America Theatre

Early in her career as a Los Angeles choreographer, Mary Jane Eisenberg made exciting mime-based performance works with little or no actual dancing in them. Lately, her pieces have focused on formal dance issues and values; any expressive content is reduced to mere implication.

However, Eisenberg’s old emphasis on gesture has survived in a vestigial state as compulsive semaphoring. This incessant waving of arms caused her new dances at the Japan America Theatre on Saturday to look manic and mannerist.

The alternating solos and culminating duet of “In Accord” played Eisenberg off against Frank J. Adams--and played off the upper limbs of these fine dancers against the lower ones. Adams in particular created a potent ambiguity from the contrast between smooth, swivelly footwork and slashing, assaultive port de bras.

But the stop-and-go rhythm, the punchy dynamics and the endless hand-jive of the work soon became enervating, despite the variety in Bruce Fowler’s jazzy brass-and-percussion score. Surprisingly, the only whole-body statements came straight from the ballet lexicon.

The balleticisms, the discontinuities, the semaphoring and the sense of dancing as an ordeal (rather than as release or expression) also characterized “Dance in 4 Directions,” set to Lisbeth Woodies’ collage of recordings by Korean, African and Apache folk musicians. Eisenberg’s six-member company executed it skillfully, but only a women’s trio dancing to vocal music surged with the raw, engulfing freedom of a primal impulse.

Nearly every other passage seemed so doggedly reworked that any pulse had vanished. Eisenberg’s new concern for technical exactitude is commendable, but why constrict or suppress her proven talents? In her pursuit of classical rigor, has she confused the academy with the penitentiary?

Eisenberg’s familiar “Group Portrait: The Satoh Piece” completed the program.