Dance and Music Reviews : ‘Solo Flight’ at LACE

A shared focus on expressive gesture gave unexpected unity to an intriguing six-part program called “Solo Flight” Thursday at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Dancer/choreographers Susan Rethorst, Mary Jane Eisenberg, Yves Musard and Donald Byrd each explored the relationship between formal dancing and behavioral movement statements.

Indeed, Rethorst sometimes appeared to be cataloguing gesture in her two pieces. “Twain” featured big, sequential contrasts between awkward and graceful motion, between the expansive and the intimate, between up and down.

With passages danced in silence and others accompanied by recorded guitar music, “Solo in Mind” heightened such contrasts through simultaneous playoffs in the upper and lower body: pantomimic, foursquare arms versus gliding and even balletic legs, for example.

In “A Woman Must Keep Moving,” Eisenberg offered another of her potent investigations of female identity--this time developing her premise through a text that approached the excesses of feminist rhetoric with both irony and yearning.

Using as many stage properties as in her early hyper-realist pieces, and a movement style as gutsy, she assembled isolated spasms of feeling into propulsive sequences based on gesture but far more physically engulfing. Exotic gamelan recordings provided a compelling rhythmic ostinato.

To an inventive collage of popular, folk and classical music from or about Spain, Musard fluently assimilated stereotypical movement data of that country. However, through his feline impressions of flamenco style, Musard’s solo also raised questions about the facade of machismo. Similarly, in one contorted beggar-pose--his head dangling to the side, an arm hanging useless up in the air, the other reaching out--”S.p.a.i.n.” delivered a glimpse of hopeless human need much truer to life than any matador image.

Byrd’s brilliantly performed “Whoosh” and “Matts” each depended on role-playing and depicted the release of an individual into galvanic dancing. In the former, he appeared in sleazy drag, providing a grotesque parody of man-eating, sex-tease cliches laced, improbably, with ballet steps.

When she slowed down or dared to stop dancing, however, this glitzy queen grew mournful--just as Byrd’s fearful character in “Matts” began to disintegrate every time he paused for breath after one of his fierce and increasingly exhausting dance-bouts.

Dance as escape from rejection, self-hatred or something you can’t face Out There: Byrd traced the desperation of everyone who ever held the world at bay for a few hours through loud music and total immersion in moving to it.

In both of Byrd’s works, the intense contributions of composer/percussionist/vocalist Mio Moraes proved too prominent to be considered merely accompaniment.