DANCE REVIEW : L.A.FESTIVAL : A Collective View of Ritual

Commissioned to make dances dealing with ritual in contemporary society, five Los Angeles choreographers seem to have drawn a blank. Their pieces, seen Friday night at the Wadsworth Theater, are long on confusion and short on pacing and fresh ideas.

The best things that the ad-hoc Dance Collective had going for it were the skill, energy and cohesiveness of the five dancers: Suzee Goldman, Nina Lucas, Sun-Mi Jin, Frank Adams and Pip Abrigo.

To a hissing, booming score by Butch Rovan, Stephanie Gilliland organized a circle of dancers who take turns falling and being caught. The movements in “Falling Circle” enlarge into swaying leans, turns, collapses and jumps, but the piece doesn’t vault over the line that separates studio dance from the evocation of a community.

“Moon-Ya” begins promisingly, with a solo by choreographer Young Ae Park. She repeatedly crosses the stage, canting her body at an angle reminiscent of Asian dance forms and interspersing brief, piquant pauses with hand gestures. For the collective, however, she added arbitrary and impenetrable tableaux.

John Pickett’s “Only My Memory Can Quench My Thirst for Continuance” juxtaposes voice-overs recounting converging dreams--of being a dolphin, a fisherman, a shopper--with sequences reminiscent of Indonesian dance.

With the percussion-and-bells score by Stephen Roach, the piece achieves an otherworldly peacefulness. But the length, repetitiousness and languor of the action nearly becalm the work.

Sarah Elgart’s frenetic “Private Lives” seems to be about religious hypocrisy. Dancers repeatedly discipline their own hands, which keep sliding to their breasts and bottoms. At one point these troubled disciples offer money to a black-garbed figure (Robert Allen).

Ironically, Elgart’s seemingly irrelevant solo--co-choreographed with Gilliland--was the collective’s only real collaborative effort.

Honors for most peculiar mishmash go to Rene Olivas Gubernick and Betty Nash. Their “Ceremony of Dreams” opens with their own semi-nude writhings and closes with a dancer doing a campy tango with an inflatable doll. In between, a decapitated pig suffers while a voice-over juicily recites a (pork?) recipe. Looks like some cooks have overseasoned the broth.