Music and Dance Reviews : Malashock Company at Lyceum Space

Former Tharp dancer John Malashock choreographs as if each piece were his last.

Even when his ideas are all over the map--as they are in his new 25-minute quartet, “Departure of the Youngsters”--Malashock’s sense of creative brinkmanship generates excitement. And the dancing itself swoops and lunges with enormous force from one unsparing confrontation to another.

Introduced Thursday at the Lyceum Space in Horton Plaza on a program of otherwise familiar works, “Departure” focuses on the outcasts of society, with mime and gesture motifs that suggest drug addicts and the homeless as well as the physically handicapped and mentally ill. Malashock identifies fiercely with their pain but, most of all, his piece seems to be about power and manipulation.

Against a moody wash of woodwinds and percussion composed by Mark Attebery, one or two of the dancers repeatedly enact rituals of anguish interrupted by others who attempt to subdue and control their behavior but, increasingly, commit acts of extreme brutality.

In one sequence, Malashock is literally shaken out of his near-catatonic isolation and then abandoned. In another, Kate Lounsbury (a watchful authority figure in the piece) and Malashock trap and terrorize Maj Xander. As they hold her down, it isn’t hard to imagine a straitjacket--just as their hands shooting past her face evoke the violent pulse of shock treatments.

Our helplessness in the face of human misery is powerfully depicted here, along with the ruthless mindset that can evolve when humane attempts at social engineering fail.

But Malashock is more committed to engulfing you in an experience than in explaining his purposes. So, inevitably, there are moments of confusion (ours, if not his)--passages that even the combined skills of Xander, Lounsbury, Debbie Toth and Malashock himself cannot untangle--along with concepts that seem part of another piece entirely.

Cultural analysts will recognize in Malashock the key characteristics of New Romanticism: the exaltation of emotion over intellect (or form), an obsession with the hopelessness of human relationships, the need to consume yourself in your art. Malashock thus belongs to the generation after postmodernism, and though he is still very young as a choreographer, nobody in Southern California is growing as fast.

Malashock Dance Company performs through Sunday in Horton Plaza, and “Departure of the Youngsters” is scheduled to be seen in Los Angeles on a “Dance Kaleidoscope” program in July.