PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Shrimps in Highways Series

When they’re really cooking, members of the local performance art group Shrimps can reveal antic and unexpected connections among sports, games, everyday behavior and stereotypic gender roles.

Unfortunately, very little of that happened when the group entered the final round of the current “Dance Traffic” series Thursday at Highways in Santa Monica. (The final performance is tonight.)

In their most focused and tightly organized work, “Scrap” (from 1987), men in business suits (Ryan Hill, Martin Kersels and Steven Nagler) and women in athletic shorts and shirts (Weba Garretson and Cindy Furchner) turned the dribbling of basketballs into competitive challenges, dodgeball games, strip-tease acts and wrestling bouts. Somehow, the evolution looked inevitable. Nothing seemed arbitrary.

Described as a work in progress from which excerpts were drawn, “Tongue,” not surprisingly, failed at this stage to cohere very much. More links occurred through its use of shadow-theater techniques (including wicked projections of simulated sex acts) than by its thematic gender reversal obsessions. (Alder Dixon and Nicole Soulanille joined the others for the piece.)

“Looks” (1990), however, had no excuse for its sprawling, indulgent messiness. By now, seeing the boys mincing about in various degrees of stripped-down drag and the girls flexing their powerhouse muscles had become routine, and antic gave way to frantic. Or maybe, desperate.

The girls looked up the boys’ dresses, the boys played pick-up sticks with brooms, everyone carried or pushed or posed with or hurled down giant gourds. At the end, the men were vanquished, the women triumphed, the gourds were ready for puree.

Pamela Casey choreographed “Tongue” and “Looks.” Steve Stewart and Mark Wheaton composed serviceable music for “Tongue” and, with Garretson, for “Looks.”