DANCE REVIEW : Margaret Jenkins Troupe at Royce Hall

San Francisco-based modern-dance choreographer Margaret Jenkins currently specializes in high-profile multimedia projects that subordinate dance expression to text, score or design.

Indeed, throughout her three-part program at UCLA’s Royce Hall Friday, she functioned mostly as an illustrator, reiterating in movement the ideas defined by her collaborators. So, even at its most stimulating, the evening offered only minor dance rewards, despite fine work by Jenkins’ accomplished eight-member company.

“Shelf Life” (1987), “Pedal Steal” (1985) and “Georgia Stone” (1987) were all, in fact, nonlinear one-act operas: Their meanings emerged from the music and texts with no real need or place for a dominant choreographic vision.

Like “Aurora’s Wedding,” Jenkins’ “Shelf Life” gathered together a number of literary characters normally familiar in the context of their own stories. In this case, however, the characters came from contemporary paperbacks--books that merged in Rinde Eckert’s text with one another and with the events of a cross-country journey.

Jenkins crafted clever movement motifs for each dancer and artfully developed a style contrasting sweeping jumps and turns with high-speed gestural spasms.

But her choreography merely embroidered the theme of the work: the way fiction can become distilled in consciousness as vividly as our most personal recollections. As a result, the central experience remained Paul Dresher’s intense rock-minimalist score (played live) and the virtuosic performance by Eckert as the narrator.

Memory and myth also dominated the atmospheric “Pedal Steal,” a rural equivalent of “Follies” in which a ruined Southwest drive-in theater summoned ghosts of past relationships and nostalgic screen images. Played (on tape) by Jo Harvey Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band, the rambling, talk-filled soundscore by Terry Allen established a theme and style that Jenkins resourcefully physicalized.

Alone of the pieces, the mournful “Georgia Stone” boasted a unifying premise never put into words: the concept of layering, worked out in the overlapping scenic panels, the white-on-white costume overlays, the parallel tracks of music, documentary material and multilingual dogma in a commissioned, pompous Yoko Ono score, plus Jenkins’ deft stratifications of motion and stage space.