FESTIVAL ’90 : DANCE REVIEW / L.A. FESTIVAL : ‘Pacific Connections’: Contrasting Works by Island Groups

Recognizing the sea as a life force for so many world cultures, the Los Angeles Festival brought to the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center on Wednesday three island groups with very obvious differences: the tiny Inupiat Eskimos of Alaska’s King Island (in the Bering Sea), the lanky Mornington Island Aboriginals from Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria and the massive Polynesians from the islands of Wallis and Futuna in the Pacific.

By contrast, “Pacific Connections” made group body type a revealing issue. Indeed the dancers’ distinctive use of this most basic natural resource became one of the major themes of the evening.

Half-squatting, with legs wide apart, the Polynesians often used their weight as a kind of power center to give the smallest motions enormous force.

The Aboriginals, however, denied weight in mostly linear statements, sometimes wielding sticks and spears as extensions of their shanklike limbs. Finally, the Eskimos enlarged their dancing by manipulation of scale, drawing you perceptually into an intimate frame-of-reference through movement close to the body and a tightly focused use of stage space.

Accompanied by voice, boomerang-percussion and didjeridoo, the Woomera Mornington Island Culture Team included children as well as adults--all wearing face and body paint, with bunches of greenery tied to the men’s knees and ropelike strands providing both over-skirts for the women and a kind of tassel hanging from the men’s waists.

Trembling legs, racheting feet and rapid (almost flicked-out) gestural metaphor for the hands and arms gave their brief nature-dances tremendous nervous energy. Samuel Pilot described their meaning lovingly and helped us see them in context.

Dressed in long grass skirts and collars, with fuschia overlays around necks and hips, the Wallis and Futuna dancers brought a disarming sweetness to traditional dances of group solidarity accompanied by voice, percussion and guitar. The muscular investment of the men’s dancing seemed especially remarkable, since their power carried absolutely no hint of threat.

Surprising frissons: When a man banged his fingers in the pole dance, he didn’t hide his pain--any more than a woman concealed her wry self-disgust when she reached a kneeling position later than anyone else. Avoiding the mask of professionalism to maintain personal contact with one another and the audience, these dancers stayed gloriously themselves throughout a long, demanding performance. We couldn’t get enough of them.

Again introduced by Lillian Tiulana, the King Island Inupiat presented the same works reviewed on the “‘Native Dance of North America” program Tuesday.