TV REVIEW : ISO Dance Theatre on KCET

Part of the Pilobolus extended family, ISO Dance Theatre cultivates an ingenuous (sometimes antic) looseness that makes its honed physical skills seem almost offhand.

Television, however, is obviously Serious Business--so tonight at 10 on KCET Channel 28, we find ISO style pretty much undercut and overwhelmed by fancy-dan camerawork, diversionary editing and other hyperprofessional production values.

Videotaped locally by the KCET arts and culture unit, “Episodes” often attempts to change intimate, labor-intensive theater pieces into glossy, MTV-style spectacle. It doesn’t work.

Many of ISO’s choreographies develop as surprising little movement riffs based on physical constraint--ankles bound together, for instance (“Psycho Killer”), or costumes that link hands and feet with lengths of ribbon (“Linguini Arms”). But instead of involving the viewer in the group’s exploration of possibilities, “Episodes” director Robert Fruchtman splinters continuity or introduces such pictorial distractions as location shooting.

Sometimes (as in “Night Thoughts”) you can barely see what Daniel Ezralow, Jamie Hampton, Ashley Roland and Morleigh Steinberg are doing for all the impressionistic camera motion and disorienting switches between extreme close-ups of body parts. And that’s a shame.

But there are signs of hope: At the very start of the abrasive “I Do” duet, catch the glimpse of a bedroom behind Ezralow and Steinberg--just enough to provide an environmental context. We don’t see it again, and there’s no need. In contrast, we never stop looking at the pillars and floors of the Doheny Mansion during “Foreign Tails,” and it only gets in the way.