DANCE REVIEW : Generator Eight Program Features Solo Artists

Powerful music-making often obliterated dance on the intimate, varied solo program in the ongoing Generator Eight festival, Sunday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Five dancer/choreographers and four composer/accompanists shared the evening.

As always, Young-Ae Park proved a glamorous and accomplished dancer but the arid formal cycle of motifs in her “Re-Turn (2,000 Light Years From Home)” never became as compelling as its score by Jin Hi Kim. Moving between a traditional Korean zither, her own electric version of the same and an hourglass drum, Kim set a standard of creative mastery beyond Park’s resources as a choreographer.

Indeed, because all Park’s switches of mood and vocabulary originated in Kim’s score, the music was clearly dominant and Park’s dancing merely an exquisite visual embellishment.

Woodwind master Vinny Golia also threatened to run away with “Passages,” but Betty Gonzalez Nash astutely built into the concept of the piece her struggle to get free of him. However, she expressed this idea more through text than movement and frequently used her versatility and sheer guts as a performer to mask mediocre dance-making skills. (Who exactly was this character, other than a collection of spectacular movement riffs and hard-sell speeches?)

In Shel Wagner’s monodrama “She Alone,” soprano Anne-Marie Bosche had an enigmatic role: mostly a witness to Wagner’s violent anguish but also, perhaps, a storyteller singing of this broken, fearful woman. Wagner’s performance capitalized on full-out intensity, secure technique and some minimal variety of means, but Bosche’s had mystery--and that’s always more compelling.

Dance and music met on equal terms in two showpieces by tapper Fred Strickler and percussionist Ray McNamara: the familiar “Five and Ten” and an untitled new work that seemed less technically complex but just as engaging. Not only did each artist inspire the other to exciting rhythmic gambits, but their interplay seemed ideally spontaneous.

Three character studies by Pat Catterson used no new or live music whatsoever--but who cared since Catterson could utterly remake herself from the inside out? Yes, even her physical proportions seemed to change as she became the spidery, dangerous “Arthur,” the forlorn, confused “Gail” and the swimming pool bimbo “Betty Jean.”

Extremely strong in her back, arms and upper torso, Catterson defined gestural detail as effortlessly as whole-body statements. At the halfway point in the Generator Eight series, she is its major discovery.

The festival resumes Thursday with a program split between Rose Polsky and Sarah Elgart.

The Pacific Dance Ensemble appears Friday and the two final bills are samplers of four companies each.