DANCE REVIEW : Tina Gerstler Opens Generator Eight Festival

Long before the Generator Eight festival of music and dance opened Thursday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the Generator Eight had become almost as controversial, in its own way, as the Catonsville Nine or the Hollywood 10.

Activist artists within the local community denounced the high fees (up to $3,300 per program plus half the box-office receipts) charged to each participating company to cover out-of-pocket expenses. They contemptuously renamed the festival “De-Generator Eight” and accused those artists accepting its conditions as having “a slave mentality.”

They, in turn, were attacked as “whiners,” unable to face the hard realities of artmaking in Los Angeles. The only important issue, many participating artists argued, was being able to make new work and get it “out there.”

Well, it’s out there, through June 17, and the question is: Does it matter? Not commercially: The opening program by Tina Gerstler’s Danceworks (with Chris Pumphrey and the Pedestrians) attracted fewer than 200 paying customers to the 498-seat Tom Bradley Theatre. Not artistically, either--not yet. Gerstler’s talent has been duly celebrated in these pages, and two pieces from her “Luna” series reminded everyone of how sensitively she can express intimate states of feeling in a personal physical language. However, her grandiose new social portrait, “City Limit,” merely collects impressions of Los Angeles with no discernible point of view or movement invention to give them distinction. Mary Jane Eisenberg (Gerstler’s former mentor) got further than this in her groundbreaking park and train station docudances more than a decade ago.

Somehow, Gerstler has noticed the oil spills and traffic jams here and strings together pantomime playlets on these subjects to a score by Pumphrey, Bill Barrett, Don Carrol, Paul Burton and Dean Moore.

Slide-show interludes by Danto Miller give token attention (sometimes in what seems a patronizing manner) to the homeless and to Latinos. A text by poet Amy Gerstler (Tina’s sister) adds what passes for perspective and a hardworking 17-member cast--a mix of dancers and just-plain-folks--behave as if one more gutless charade about Venice Beach shenanigans just might be worth our time.

It isn’t, not in a city that’s produced Eisenberg, John Malpede, Rachel Rosenthal, Tim Miller and others who see beyond the obvious L.A. ironies that form the boundaries of “City Limit.”

Only in a sequence for six women wearing slips do we find Gerstler probing for essences and using dance imaginatively--though here we’re very much back on her “Luna” turf, with women slumping despairingly, reaching out, needing one another.

The 1989 “Luna” duet “Blackhole” (with Cynthia Hord and Grace Pumphrey) adds to this m.o. an edge of hostility plus some timid, promising forays into contact-improvisation technique.

Gerstler’s “Luna” solo, “Nova,” from the same year shows us a woman unwillingly possessed by her emotions and transfigured by the purity of her pain. It is the first work of the evening and the only fully realized creation.

Besides supplying dance accompaniments, Chris Pumphrey and his band performed “Mom Bakes Us Bread,” his mellow, rollicking duet for guitar (Pumphrey) and mandolin (Carl Syberg), along with with his “Light Year,” a moody group piece awash in exotic instrumental textures: wind chimes, seed tubes, bullroarer, ocarina, didjeridu.

Generator Eight continues tonight with a split bill: LAMD & B and Shok-T. The Sunday program is devoted to solo artists.