Music and Dance Reviews : Choreography Showcase

Crisp, urgent and mysterious, Young-Ae Park’s gestures imbued “Da Mong” (“Dream Layers”) with a precision and directness missing in several other pieces on the Choreographers Showcase program on Saturday at Barnsdall Park Gallery Theatre.

Her body stilled but never slack, Park used her hands to portray the life span of an insect. They stirred the air, came to rest on her tilted, “sleeping” head and fluttered with subtle control.

Strong performers Sarah Pogostin and Steven Craig offered a brave, catatonic duet (“Limb”) punctuated with fidgeting, impotent gestures, passages of floor-hugging inertia and sudden, awkward eruptions of desperate love.

Kathy Waggoner, who collaborated with Stephanie Gilliland to create “Paper Thin,” lent a deadpan, robotic impulse to the doll-like punk-ballet solo. Spiced with playful feints and face-offs, Rose Polsky’s speedy “Duet One” with Sigmund Hightower shot new energy into the couple-combat genre.

Other pieces were saddled with woolly or jejune concepts. Jill Jacobson-Bennett’s “Static Echo,” which she performed with Kelly Benningfield, was an interminable linkage of vague poses and repetitious unison movements.

Larded with overemphatic facial inflection, solemnly drawn out small movements and galumphing large ones, Jan Day’s “Ritual of Being-or-Personal Agreement” seemed fussy and lifeless.

Lori DuPeron’s “P.S.Ehhh???” involved her in a lot of disco-manic activity and shrill sloganeering about human rights, with David Leahy as sidekick. Adrienne Armor’s film, “Hush,” also seemed influenced by the fake profundities of music videos.