DANCE REVIEW : Shok-T’s ‘Ring of Emergence’ at Generator Eight

Sometimes at the Generator Eight festival, you take authentic, purposeful movement wherever you can find it.

Midway through the Shok-T company’s quasi-ritualistic “Ring of Emergence,” Saturday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Jim Berenholtz played a wooden flute while perched on one leg, and the python he had placed around his neck slowly moved down his arm onto the instrument. Whatever your feeling about snakes, the moment briefly took Rene Olivas Gubernick’s latest essay in faked folklore into the realm of genuine experience.

Impatient and arbitrary in its barrage of effects, “Ring of Emergence” turned central themes from many world cultures into a cheap diversion tailored to the most limited attention-span. Tired of mask and drum dances? Here comes divination with sticks, interplay with seed tubes and that python. Any single part might have yielded a potent contemporary work--Keith Terry and I Wayan Dibia proved the point in a recent “In the Works” collaboration. At the LATC, however, only the snake understood that you don’t abridge a natural process.

In Martha Kalman’s dramatic showpiece “On the Way to Becoming,” a figure in black stalking the periphery of the stage had a weight and integrity that all of Kalman’s florid, center-stage flailing failed to achieve. Finally, another decisive victory for unadorned, non-dance motion occurred in Kalman and Gubernick’s “Inverted Carnival,” with their labored gymnastic duets becoming eclipsed but also recontextualized by painter Jean Edelstein’s attempts to capture them on canvas.

Obviously, painting on stage during a performance isn’t new (Twyla Tharp incorporated it in the original “Deuce Coupe,” for example, and Rudy Perez used it in an L.A. Festival piece at the LATC in 1987). But Edelstein’s graphic insights on the the Kalman/Gubernick partnership created an unusual transformation on stage Saturday, making her subjects infinitely more interesting as models than they had been as dancers. In her jagged black lines and patches of pastel, they had found their raison d’etre.

Half the program Saturday belonged to the 39-member LAMD & B, less a company than a performing arm of Naomi Goldberg’s School of Dance and Movement at the Hollywood/Los Feliz Jewish Community Center.

With her “Looking in a Fishtank” last year, Goldberg created an endearing statement championing the widest possible participation in dance: from an infant to a senior citizen, from professional dancers to civilians who just gotta move--and even a former local dance critic.

Love of dance and Goldberg’s deft stagecraft again sustained the piece on Saturday--but the five preceding miniatures looked like an annual dancing-school recital, of interest only to the participants’ intimates and blood-relatives.

For the record, the divertissements included Joy Hewitt’s genial tap number “Close Enough,” Alder Dixon’s fragmentary, sinewy modern dance solo “A Sudden Twist,” Gary Mascaro’s gritty, mime-based drama “The Black Cat” (incorporating drugs, sex and a feline on pointe), Goldberg’s formal postmodern exercise in discontinuity “The Farmhouse Scene” and her balletic “Sonatine”--ridiculously mannered and ineptly executed.

Dancing by Hewitt and Jim Taylor, Joey Letteri, Tina Carlisi, Dixon, Goldberg (sometimes) and a few others contradicted the evidence that LAMD & B is merely an outlet for wanna be’s who play at dance. Therapeutic--unless you’re in the audience.