DANCE REVIEW : Perez, Martinez Launch ‘In the Works’ Series

Onstage at an intimate new studio theater in Culver City, choreographer Francisco Martinez is showing an audience the building blocks of a one-act suite called “Places.”

By having his six-member cast run through major transitions, Martinez clarifies structural components--the way new arrangements of chairs define changing interpersonal relationships. And by speaking of friends lost to AIDS, he primes the audience for the expressive context of the piece, its sense of aborted, unrecoverable closeness.

Purposeful and comprehensive, Martinez’s introduction delivers “Places” on a silver platter and, after the actual performance, few questions remain. In effect the dance has been given to the public pre-digested.

This is the mission of “In the Works,” a Dance Gallery series running on six Sunday evenings through June at the Gascon Institute, a fencing school in the old Helms Bakery building. In her welcome, Bella Lewitzky calls the series “an entree to the making of a dance from the choreographer’s point of view,” informal lecture-demonstrations on works in progress. Through a lot of talk and a little dancing, supposedly the audience will understand better what it sees--or what it’s been told to see.

Martinez’s half of the program proves that the process can work--even if it robs us of some of the surprises of encountering new choreography. But what about Rudy Perez’s section? Here we find one of Los Angeles’ preeminent dance-makers alarmingly tense and defensive--pacing, reminiscing, complaining and settling personal scores in random bursts, but only occasionally offering insights about one of his lightest, most accessible works, “One + 2 Plus 1 = Mischief.”

With specific references to modeling and MTV, Perez has fashioned a sharp commentary on the way pop culture packages performers, but his inability to package himself as commentator creates an irony that he didn’t intend--one that calls Lewitzky’s whole premise into question.

Since “In the Works” focuses on the marketing of dance, there’s a danger that choreographers like Perez might be judged insufficient in TV talk-show terms: too self-absorbed to be satisfying raconteurs, eloquent only in their art.

What for? Some of us have always deeply admired Perez; is there any reason to pity him now? Don’t we already have too many celebrity authors who are better at self-promotion than on the printed page? Why force Rudy Perez to be Alistair Cooke?

If we could believe what we see--if dance were all--”In the Works” might be chatterless, convinced that Perez and Martinez express themselves splendidly through their dancers.

Certainly “Places” stands on its own as a finely wrought, mainstream contemporary ballet, artful in its hybrid vocabulary, sophisticated in its stagecraft, sensitive in its use of piano music by Mendelssohn, and disappointing mostly in the efficient but rather unfeeling performances by most of the cast. And even here, Martinez astutely camouflages his company’s limitations, demanding sustained intensity only from himself and from the dynamic Amy Ernst (least classical of the company women). He deserves to be much better known.

Like Tommy Peltier’s score, Perez’s choreography for “One + 2 Plus 1 = Mischief” has a weighty undercurrent that invites us to examine the pop culture values being depicted. It’s easy to fall for the piece’s sexual salesmanship--to accept the invitation to cruise Jeffrey Grimaldo, for instance, or to return Anne Goodman’s come-hither stare. We’re used to seeing dancers as meat, to finding lots of attitude and flashy moves and body worship passing for dance.

It takes a Rudy Perez to tease us with this kind of spectacle and yet build a sardonic critique of it into every pose, to suggest what happens to the beautiful young people who become nothing but a reflection of our fantasies.

Subversive, pitiless, disarmingly elegant, here is choreography distinctively of this moment and place--and it needs more opportunities to be seen, not hapless attempts to make its creator explain himself.

You want to make a work more accessible to the uninitiated? Dance it, take questions, then dance it again. The meaning is always in the act, not the debriefing. “In the Works” needs to get its priorities straight.