DANCE REVIEW : Eloquent ‘Dancetales’ in Laguna Beach

New York dancer Sally Hess, who performed Sunday night at the Second Annual Dance Invitational at Laguna Beach High School, is more remarkable for what she says than what she does.

That’s not to say she isn’t a polished and well-trained mover. She is. But the way she puts words together is arresting and memorable, while her dancing comes across as gracefully apropos punctuation, rather than as a fresh way of organizing the body.

The brief, compact program consisted of a group of pieces from “Dancetales,” written and choreographed by Hess in collaboration with Victor Byrd, a vocal coach. In “Lullabye,” she conjures up the secure and imaginative world of her childhood, adding ruminative passages that point to larger issues.

A favorite game involved plunging down on a big green chair (she stands on half-toe to show how large it was and shoots her upper body down to the floor). After amusingly recalling other household chairs, she says: “Both the hard and the soft can suffer and die from private moments and the slow shifts of human families.”

Childhood visits to a natural history museum in which a stuffed buffalo grazes on tufts of grass (she evokes them with low, springy jumps) got her wondering about the difference between “real fake grass and fake-fake grass” and whether she wasn’t “secretly faking being real.”

When her childhood self refuses to go to bed in “a savage refusal to end the day” (she churns her arms, shakes her head), she is placated by a servant named Esther who wears “red lipstick that always went too far in the wrong direction and stayed there.” Esther would draw the curtains around her body and then hold them out. (Hess twines and extends her own statuesque figure, pausing in a semi-crouched diver’s stance.)

A piece called “Men” begins inauspiciously with coy flouncing and prancing to Laura Nyro singing “I Met Him on Sunday,” but then it gets down to business with memorable images of particular dates. One is a tall man who swoops her off for a three-day “flamboyance of passion” and promises to call. Four years later, riding the subway (Hess on half-toe, knees turned in), she is finally able to free herself from “the long anger of his absence.”

Hess’ delicious, fast-paced catalogue of the immense variety of men in the world--accompanied by long-legged poses reminiscent of Jules Feiffer’s cartoon figures--elicited frequent laughter from the attentive but minuscule audience.

The Second Annual Dance Invitational concludes Wednesday with a 7:30 p.m performance by Dee McCandless and Lynn Raridon at Laguna Beach High School, 625 Park Ave., Laguna Beach. Tickets: $10 donation at the door. Information: (714) 494-8505.