DANCE REVIEW : Polsky and Elgart Premieres

Ostensibly, they were sharing a program. But when Rose Polsky and Sarah Elgart, along with their respective companies, actually put foot to board for Thursday’s Generator Eight Festival at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the divvying up looked far from even. Not to worry.

Polsky proved, with her entry (against three of Elgart’s), that less is emphatically more, that a subject plumbed and long thought about resonates in the mind’s eye--while a hastily made collage vanishes with the first blink.

But Polsky does her best work as a soloist. In “Broken,” which had its premiere on this agenda, the compelling sections were those with the choreographer alone and with Don Bondi, who danced in aggressive double-time around her as she slowly evoked a hyper-personal and poetic consciousness.

The piece is about AIDS and focuses on a male couple, only one of whom is dying at first. It engages a corps that, somewhat simplistically, portrays a harmonious community coming to terms with this disease holocaust. And it relies at times on melodramatic cliches as well as graphic enactments of illness and tragic realizations.

But there are inspired moments, too, even without Polsky on the scene. When the couple stands still, listening to a train on an inexorable course, one knows what it must have been like to face such a transport to a death camp.

However, it is the narrator of this tale, Polsky, who manages to say more about Pieta and pathos with a few divinely legible movements--arcing, upper-body turns and hand-flutterings and somnambulistic chaines --than all the rest put together.

For the remaining two-thirds of the evening Elgart held forth. Her premiere “Sleepless,” might not have seemed so shallow and thrown-together had it stood alone. But following “Eleventhour” (also about AIDS) and “Zoo,” one could detect a sameness of method, and a glib, crank-’em-out mentality to her work.

What you get is a theme, more or less coherent, and a squad of dancers doing semaphoric calisthenics or gestures-in-code. The kicker for “Sleepless” involves a late-night disc jockey a la Jean Shephard, sitting at sidestage, and an insomniac corps--flailing, rocking, gyrating, waltzing, bumping and humping to the groans of a band called Skinny Puppy.