DANCE REVIEW : Andres’ ‘Eyes’ in West Coast Premiere

An intense and restless hour of images and movements, Jo Andres’ “Before Your Eyes: Lucid Possession” received its West Coast premiere Thursday at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The New York choreographer’s piece combines dance, light manipulations, slides, film and densely atmospheric music by the likes of Elliott Sharp and the Cocteau Twins into something rich and strange--but too diffuse to be genuinely powerful.

With piercing stares and taut concentration (to which Cynthia Meyers and Ellen Sirot seemed more committed than Andres) the three dancers repeated a sequence of glide steps and poses with Indian-statue-style out-thrust hips or one-legged balances. Arms snapped into geometric positions or rose into palms-out worshipful gestures. Fingers curled into fists under out-thrust arms or waggled in sparking unison.

Then the tricks began, separated by blackouts. Liquid blue and yellow patterns flowed over a dancer making small, slow movements in tenebrous darkness. Billowing fabric sent changing patterns skipping and tumbling through the air in brilliant whizzes of color. Images of figures projected on manipulated lengths of cloth played tug-of-war. A film lingered on images of a woman with blank eye sockets. Phosphorescent liquid gave dancers’ limbs the look of skittering neon tubes.

In pure-dance interludes, the women’s movements grew harsher and wilder, with shaking legs, zombie jumps, stumbles and dicing hands or the wide-legged stamping frenzy of an Emile Nolde painting. Sometimes the dancers formed a primitive community, at one point leading Andres downstage with arms extended like a sacrificial victim.

But the length and repetition of the final film sequence--as well as the uncompelling, quasi-Surrealist quality of the imagery--kept the accumulated tension of the movement from properly dominating the piece.