DANCE REVIEW : Eisenberg’s ‘Going Up’ Rises to the Occasion

A church gym, ghostly electronic emanations of a Baroque Mass and sweating, sneakered acolytes working their bodies in a kind of penance--these were the terrific components Wednesday when the Mary Jane Eisenberg Dance Company performed at the First Methodist Church of Hollywood.

Eisenberg’s hourlong piece, “Accumulated Assumptions--Going Up,” was almost terrific too. Especially the part that featured Lisbeth Woodies’ and Brad Dutz’s original score. Its ethereal “Kyrie Eleison” gradually stretched and bent by a synthesizer and studded with light percussion became an ode to contemporary piety quite on its own.

But together with the somnolent figures--now stalking the floor in vaguely prayerful unison processions, hinting ever so subtly at a kind of self-flagellation--the work was strangely compelling. The dance motif, mostly based on a relay pattern--one movement per dancer instantly triggering the next--had a high-tension quality. Especially when the accumulation of these single motions finally led to contact sport between the dancers, aggressive and tender, always charged.

What didn’t work was Eisenberg’s opening monologue-confession--assorted remembrances from childhood, autobiographical banalities that only revealed the small world of a single person. Worse, the other dancers ratified this self-importance with their testimonial endorsements of her.

Also, the piece lost momentum and coherence by way of padding: arbitrary workout segments to jungle rhythms. But Eisenberg struck a note of pathos toward the end when she talked about being “lost--in people, in feelings, in relationships, in dreams.” And she made at least one viewer appreciate creative auto-therapy. Woody Allen has no monopoly on it.