DANCE REVIEW : From Surreal to Traditional: Kaleidoscope ’89

All the things that typically go into a potpourri like Dance Kaleidoscope ’89 found their way to the Music Hall stage Sunday afternoon at Cal State L.A.

There were solo dances exploring highly personal but wordless poetry. There was an agitprop lamentation that dealt with a Central American country under siege, as well as one dealing with the holocaust in our midst: AIDS.

There was at least one example of surreal chic and one traditional flamenco extravaganza on this lengthy second program of the series. There was even an intermission mime named Zoot competing for attention.

Mark Taylor’s “Batucada,” a samba suite filtered through postmodern sensibilities, came across as a thing of subtle suggestions--up to and including the costumes and the small-scaled, almost incidental dance patterns that the Pacific Dance Ensemble performed so capably.

But what marked Suzee Goldman’s “Signs” was the integrity of its ideas. A three-part vignette, the solo traces an innocent schoolgirl through her progression to an urban-wise tough to a being transported beyond worldly concerns.

Maintaining an acrobatic movement style through all phases, Goldman offered her most striking image in a sculptural adagio. By comparison Betzi Roe’s “Water,” though well danced, faded like the idle lyricism of its Isadora tribute.

Martha Kalman’s and Rene Olivas Gubernick’s multimedia piece, “Of Widows and Generals,” seemed shallow and poorly thought out, going from one predictable assault, rape or murder to another. Sara Elgart’s “Eleventhhour”--grieving figures with their short, rhythmic motions bouncing off Charles Bernstein’s wonderfully pseudo-sacred score--is engaging because it’s well made.

So is David Leahy’s “Lapse of Memory.” Startlingly cinematic, it sets up a Magritte mystery with the appearance of a dowager widow and a young Louise Brooks in black slip who leaps onto a man in white trousers. A properly operatic climax finds the heroine falling down, rolling and getting up to a background of Wagner’s “Liebestod.”

Occupying their own distinctly virtuosic place on a bill with the above experimentalists, flamenco dancers Linda Vega and Juan Talavera were all fiery intensity.