Dance Reviews : Pacific Dance Ensemble Showcases Choreographer Mix

Because modern dance is an art emphasizing both personal vision and an original movement language, sampler programs often prove frustrating. Case in point: the five-part Pacific Dance Ensemble performance Friday at the Assistance League Playhouse.

Instead of drawing you into an individual artist’s unique sensibility, this evening emphasized variety--as if the components were interchangeable showpieces. The juxtapositions yielded no new insights and there were none of the extenuating justifications for such programming: a shared special premise or purpose, for instance, or the chance to reach the big audiences unavailable to struggling single-choreographer companies. This was variety by default.

First up, Gilberte Meunier’s formal quintet “It Was a Large Room” (music by Laurie Anderson) deftly contrasted weighty circular motion and paths with buoyant forward-and-back actions and trajectories. Increasingly, however, Meunier’s resourceful spatial design dominated (and unified) her contrasts.

Next at bat: Young-Ae Park’s perplexing “A Wrinkle in Space (Par Avion),” largely overwhelmed by a haunting original score by Lorenzo Buhne and obsessed with contrasts of its own--between walking steps and fluid, lyrical dancing, for example. Sometimes Park took commonplace gestures (including a handshake) and isolated them, and sometimes the formal dancing highlighted the rigidity and artifice of academic placement.

Park set up all manner of tantalizing dichotomies, but who had time to sort out her ambitious playoffs between “natural” and “unnatural” movement, societal and artistic codes of motion?--because on came Lisbeth Davidow’s “Full Circle.” This surging duet incorporated a wedge-shaped sculpture unit with seven attached doors (each one smaller than the last) by Megan Williams. Set to music by Egberto Gismonti, it was exactly the kind of piece that succeeds on such a program: simple, showy, with no loose ends or aftereffect whatsoever.

Following intermission came Karl Schaffer and Erik Stern’s ironic “The Curse of E.S.P.” (previously reviewed) and Tina Gerstler’s new trio “Talking to Myself,” which featured an artfully layered score by Brad Dutz that ideally complemented Gerstler’s theme: the paralysis resulting from overlapping confusion and self-doubt.

Using gesture to objectify states of mind and structural ploys to make purposeful movement statements out of supposedly purposeless behavior, Gerstler created something distinctive, exciting and very finely wrought. She is an increasingly important locally based artist, not always well served by these grab-bag bills, but here quietly triumphant.

Pacific Dance Ensemble performed all five works capably and the program boasted first-rate lighting and sound.