DANCE REVIEW : New York-Based Anti-Theatrical Jansen Company at CalArts

A kinder and gentler world is hardly the one Joann Fregalette Jansen tries to depict with her New York-based dance company, which appeared Thursday at CalArts. Rather, she shows the disorganizational aftermath of a faulty system.

But what, exactly, has gone wrong? Can we assume that the choreographer’s brand of stage autism is a manifestation of neurobiological disturbance? Or a withdrawal response to the horrors of everyday human experience?

Whichever, Jansen and her 3-year-old troupe have framed the picture sharply and carefully, using just a limited number of exposures to transmit the message.

Jansen’s is an anti-theatrical game plan at work, one that seems to embrace a kind of hyper-realism. In “Western Screams,” for instance, set to futuristic country music, the movements are desultory and disconnected. The dancers, wrapped like mummies in white stretch fabric, stare with red-rimmed eyes at some non-existent object, and their bodies, spastic and uncoordinated, are the preserve of motor impulses.

When they do relate, it is without eye contact, in a blind stumbling. Insensate, they gravitate to each other--another body becomes a haven. Or they go through rapid pumping repetitions, a kind of masturbatory convulsion.

But every once in a while, Jansen has them break out in big, loopy, elastic movements that are lusciously balletic, and these brief, nearly formal dance episodes cunningly provide a dynamic. They offset and color the main order of business: looking at a failure in human circuitry.

“Joy of Crushing,” a duet that reprises the same involuntary clinging-pumping, hints at some elementally engulfing problem. The partners break away from each other and rush to console themselves with self-caressing.

The most arresting number, “Aromas and Infidels,” allows Jansen to keep her integrity while expanding horizons. Here the women wear skirts--actually, artfully layered shirts tied around the waist--and the men, jackets and jockey shorts. A voice-over in Bill Ruyle’s Weillian-flavored Latin music mentions “the reciprocity of orifices,” which Jansen illustrates in open-mouthed motifs. For the finale, dancers seated on the floor become silently screaming grotesques. The piece pulsates with relative energy and goes in for unison maneuvers, albeit those resembling palsy. Like the others it lets the viewer glimpse one person’s distinct universe.