Music and Dance Reviews : Terri Lewis Dance Concert at Wilshire Ebell Theatre

The Terri Lewis Dance Ensemble failed to advance beyond rudimentary ideas and choreography in a four-part program at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.

In two works Saturday, Lewis revealed a penchant for story ballets, but only sketched out the plot and failed to create real characters.

Her “The Nightingale” (set to Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale”) gives the nod to the familiar fairy tale. Four women noodle around on point and flourish fans. The panels of Janna Tuckett and Brain Ort’s attractive set unit suddenly fly open to reveal the Emperor (Jef Velez) who walks around the stage. A woman in purple (Patrician Morgan) dances with vague bird-like motions; a woman in yellow (Teresa Arteaga) moves with stiff, flexed arm and hand gestures. A woman in black (Laura Bostrom) stalks with hunched shoulders and hands twisted into claws.

What kind of man is the emperor? Why does he reject the nightingale for the mechanical toy? How is it that the living bird can ward off the figure of death? How does the emperor change?

Who knows? In movement terms, Lewis addresses none of these issues.

Similarly in Lewis’ “At Delphi” (set to a commissioned sound score by Paul Hodgins), Morgan enacted vague Pythic intoxications while attendants Tamara Williams and Aletheia Zaremba posed and Velez was kept on hold to make a feminist’s point about male domination.

Ann Atwell-Zoll’s “Forever and Ever and Ever” (set to part of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat) played one concept over and over, juxtaposing an actor (Kevin Anders Rosenqvist) and two lilac-costumed dancers (Arteaga and Bostrom). The women dance lyrically and happily; the man remains an outcast and frequently drops to the floor in despair.

“Taking Off,” a haphazard collaborative effort by Lori DuPeron, Lewis and Anet Margot Ris to an assembled score, challenged the five-member company with more movement tasks than anything else on the program, and the dancers responded gamely but without much focus or impact.