Dance : Park Explores Personal, Cultural in Hollywood

Just when “Dandelion,” Young-Ae Park’s modern dance program Friday at the Barnsdall Park Gallery Theatre in Hollywood, seemed hopelessly mired in prettiness, the choreographer pulled a fast one.

She dropped all the outdated sylph-like imagery for the raw irony of “English Lesson.”

Here, in a context of a mock rock video (music by Nobuko Miyamoto, lyrics by Park), Park attempts to communicate her emotional needs through broken English to her lover (Allen Tombello), but finds his insistence upon good grammar ultimately defeating. The personal becomes the cultural and vice versa. Intriguing.

Nothing else on the program measured up to this work. Park could find, arrest, manipulate and dismiss force fields of energy within and around her tensile, lithe body (“Da Mong”). She could express moments of wistfulness or vulnerability (“Return”). But while she always looked interesting, rarely did she induce you to empathize with her.

As a choreographer for others, Park could draw on a sense of pictorial balance and design, utilize movement counterpoint and wrap everything up in cyclic structures (“Descent” and “Moon Ya”). The program opened and closed, for instance, with a soloist isolated under a light from the ceiling, and that image recurred in many of the works on the program.

But she also could seriously misjudge proportion and effect. While the pretty images occasionally gave way to more horrific suggestions (in “Descent” and “Moon Ya”), Park spent so much time drawing out the lyric side of things that by the time the characters got around to expressing any suffering, who could care?