DANCE REVIEW : Potent Dramas by Malashock

There’s a moment in several John Malashock dance dramas when people grab their upturned arms or wrists as if checking an alarming pulse--afraid that the force of unbearable pain might burst out of their bodies at any instant.

And of course it does--in dancing of the deepest, rawest emotion, dancing in which Malashock’s cast and audience are swept into the same vortex. Four years after forming his own San Diego-based company, this former Tharp dancer is becoming a leader in the trend toward pure feeling in choreography, the use of movement as an outlet rather than a symbol. You can’t think your way through his pieces or decode them; you either empathize or you’re lost.

At the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday, Malashock placed the four-member Mark Attebery Ensemble on a platform over the last three rows of seats in Sherwood Auditorium and also had enormous loudspeakers flanking the proscenium. The audience thus sat in a virtual force-field, watching the stage but bombarded from all sides by Attebery’s score for “Stan’s Retreat,” a score that not only accompanied the dancing but also helped give it a distinctive ‘40s flavor.

Suggested by characters in Carson McCullers’ novel “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” this new, one-act exploration of relationships featured a pair of stifled women (the tough, assertive Maj Xander, the yearning, resigned Debi Toth) who sometimes resembled Antony Tudor’s Hagar and Agnes de Mille’s Lizzie in their needs and gestural rhetoric.

Like Tudor and De Mille, Malashock used lyrical lovers (Bill Doolin and Loni Palladino) to highlight the torment of his protagonists. And he himself played the catalyst: an outsider desperately searching for love and acceptance. Malashock never sentimentalized this search nor let his duets become swoony display vehicles. Instead, they remained deliberately abortive, rough-hewn, primal--and unpredictable.

Previously, Malashock’s dances all took place in an engulfing eternal present; here, however, his ‘40s characters actually grew. And their growth was expressed not through conventional dance-mime or playacting but by exchanges of weight, degrees of synchrony and shared vocabularies: dance values honed by Malashock’s generation to convey nuance directly, through physical relationships.

If “Stan’s Retreat” represented a major advance for Malashock thematically, his new “Take This Waltz” showcased a greatly increased surety of means. His sharper compositional sense proved especially inventive in the finale, with one couple kneeling in the foreground, gesturally reflecting the surging, whole-body statements of two dancers further upstage. Through this unusual juxtaposition, Malashock made his ideas doubly potent.

Set to four songs by Leonard Cohen, this study of manipulation kept the figures-of-control enigmatic, as is usual with Malashock. Sometimes they seemed oppressive (blocking, trapping, forcing participation), but elsewhere benign (protecting and guiding someone dangerously out of control).

His familiar “Departure of the Youngsters” (on the same program) depicted manipulation as central to an obsessive, inescapable human power struggle: the helpless victimized by those In Charge. “Take This Waltz,” however, showed how people shape others to their needs--and, in the process, teach them, change them and, in turn, are taught and changed.

Malashock’s choreography has always focused on the abrasions of relationships, but his two premieres on Friday suggested a new sensitivity toward possible gains as well as losses. This is a dynamic young artist changing as fast as his characters, yet always exciting for the commitment and immediacy of his work.

His dancers and the Attebery musicians are scheduled to repeat this ambitious and often powerful program at the Japan America Theatre on May 11 and 12--but not necessarily with surround sound.