Dance and Music Reviews : Sydney Dance Company in Murphy’s ‘Some Rooms’

A fellow wearing a towel walks into the bathroom, sits down on the toilet and poses like Rodin’s “The Thinker.” That sophomoric piece of business comes from “Some Rooms,” an evening-long exercise in vulgarity and vacuous athleticism performed by the Sydney Dance Company Friday night at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus.

According to the press materials, company artistic director Graeme Murphy’s 1983 piece reflects “different aspects of the human outlook.” A Voyager (Paul Mercurio) wanders through bedroom, bathroom, changing room and reading room, to espy--or participate in--moments of other people’s lives.

This journey involves tortuous gymnastics and a frantic air of high- (and low-) tech manipulation, including film and slide projections, colored smoke and a traveling plastic box that allows performers to poke up from the stage floor or waft up toward the flies.

Oh, there’s music too, by Britten (from “Peter Grimes”) and Poulenc (the Organ Concerto) and some other famous guys. It isn’t danced to so much as wafted over the movements, like squirts of perfume, as if in the vain hope of giving the proceedings an aura of high seriousness.

In the first, “Bedroom” act, Mercurio indulges in inchworm-like preening as he rises from bed and enjoys his own physical prowess. These moments--the first and last bits of serious dancing in the piece--are interrupted by His Dream Love (Tonia Kelly) and couples in white who represent His Nightmare. Love involves some cumbersome gymnastic partnering and vapid, Ice Capades poses (Murphy actually has choreographed for skaters Torvill and Dean). Bad dreams involve the manhandling of women by men and men by women, with a series of peremptory holds and carries.

In the “Bathroom” act--which features a surprise visit from a priest and a couple of acolytes--principal dancer Janet Vernon tries to look sinful-but-scared in her flesh-colored leotard as she pops in and out of the tub while her lover (Ross Philip) uses the facilities. Then he has his hands full fighting off a jockstrap-clad apparition (Mercurio) who finally disappears into plastic-box hell.

And so it goes, with a rip-off from Pilobolus in the “Changing Room” act (“giant” women running round on men’s legs) and a sudden volte-face in the last act to plug the life of the mind. Reclining prettily in a white shoji-screened room, the company pretends to read white pamphlets. They fly upward (thanks to a film projection) like so many white birds. MTV would love it.