Music and Dance Reviews : Tribute to Women in the Arts at Occidental College

At community events like “Arts Alive,” held Friday at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, the loftiness of the rhetoric tends to be in inverse proportion to the quality of the work.

Produced by the Light-Bringer Project, the event was intended as a tribute to women in the arts. But the long and often tedious evening belied the Chautauqua-style tone of uplift adopted by host Barbara Babcock.

The best moments belonged to Ronnie Brosterman of San Diego-based Three’s Company and Dancers. In her “Woman on a Vine” solo, she wound herself in a delicate and private way in and out of a long rag-fluttering rope to the gently percussive, raga-tinged music of Sheila Chandra.

“Celebration,” Katja Biesanz’s sprightly piece for six women in white dresses, created a sense of female community in which ensemble whirling gave way to sturdy partnering and a circle dance. But having the women pretend to sing along with the music (an unspecified work by J.S. Bach) seemed a pointless joke. Biesanz’s wispy “Chagall’s Circus” leaned heavily on the charm and inventiveness of her own costume designs.

The fourth dance selection, “Loss of Innocence” by Terri Lewis was a stagey melodrama in which a group of women and children witnesses attacks on women by a strongman resembling an escapee from “Spartacus.” Arms were repeatedly extended in stale “mourning” postures and at the end everyone scrambled into place for the final despairing tableau.

Sandra Tsing Loh, whose three-man ensemble plowed their way through some of her doggedly unelastic, unswinging jazz compositions, does have an ace up her sleeve. Her mischievous dissection of melodic and other devices in the score of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” was genuinely fresh and funny.

Vocalist Lise Dickerson accompanied herself at the piano in a selection of her own songs and “Amazing Grace.” Miked, her voice was most appealing at caressing whisper-level.

Theater was least well-served of the arts with an interminable, improbable playlet (credited to the Light-Bringer Project) set in pre-World War II Paris and acted by three student actresses woefully in need of proper direction.