Music and Dance Reviews : Second Twisted Spring Program at LACE

In the second “Twisted Spring” program, performed over the weekend at LACE, three choreographers marshalled strong visual elements to create works less interesting as dancing than as polemics about individuals and cultures in crisis.

Using adjacent Mill Street as a staging area, Rene Olivas Gubernick collaborated with Martha Kalman, designer Jeanne Slater, and the 4Gunas, an improvisational music group, on “Sacred Ground (In the City of Lost Angeles),” a bewildering ritual which transformed a ragged derelict to an image of Miss Liberty bearing aloft a flaming torch.

Emerging from a dumpster in a puff of smoke, powdering the pavement, painting himself red, white and blue, setting fire to a barrel of trash and dousing Kalman, Gubernick was interrupted at one point by a couple of local denizens unaware that a performance was in progress, despite the audience massed on the sidewalk and the four musicians pounding on drums and the dumpster.

The outdoor performance, lit by the headlights of pickup trucks, had a wild spontaneous energy. Rika Ohara’s interminable, depressive “Shelter (Phase II),” by contrast, consisted primarily of the choreographer lying, standing or sitting immobilized while a blaring male voice read her translation from the work of Yukio Mishima. Slides of grid-like designs, alternating with countdown symbols from kinescopes, both lit and decorated the rear wall.

Lori Duperon offered three short works, sleek in presentation but limited in movement invention. The first, “In Passing,” was co-choreographed with fellow dancer Ann Paquette; in long dark dresses, they skittered across the floor like religious postulants, flagellating themselves with their own flailing arms.

In a quartet for chairs and two-faced women, the frenzied score by Mark Governor and lighting by Tom Dennison could not mask the fact that the choreography was mostly just running around.