DANCE REVIEW : Margie Gillis Is Powerful but Unchallenged by Pieces

The lusty intensity of Margie Gillis’ dancing is a powerful thing, so passionate and technically assured that it easily sustained a solo concert Saturday night at McKinney Theatre at Saddleback College.

Her statuesque body can transform itself into many guises: earthy, regal, deformed, kittenish, otherworldly. But at least one member of the audience wished that Gillis would find more challenging choreographers to make pieces for her, rather than relying so heavily on her own girlishly romantic inventions.

On the other hand, it’s a good sign that the most recent of her pieces--on a program of works dating from 1977 to 1989--is probably her best.

“Bloom” is set to a portion of Molly Bloom’s famous monologue from the end of James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” (heard in the definitive Siobhan McKenna recording). Gillis--a dancing actress in the same sense that opera can claim some singing actors--illustrates both the rhythm and the sense of the vividly sensual text with her body.

She squats impishly in midair to illustrate the words “new-laid eggs,” stamps and kicks in a paroxysm of gleeful comeuppance as she scolds her lover for his errant ways, reels backward at the thought of how much she loves flowers, and runs her hands lovingly down her body when she talks about her sexual self.

Gillis has a way of isolating significant movements by wrapping them in minimal movement: When Molly initially says “Yes”--the first of a volley of affirmatives that echo throughout the passage--the dancer simply lifts her chin to reveal her pent-up pleasure and anticipation.

Her most movingly dramatic moments occurred during Martha Clarke’s piece, “Nocturne” (to music by Felix Mendelssohn), a portrait of an aging ballerina. One bent “chicken” arm covers her bare breasts; the other arm sketches painfully inexact movements that reveal the hopeless erosion of her talent just as nakedly.

Finally, she collapses into an ugly heap of flesh, able to exit the stage only--ah, the power of illusion!--by using the ribbon of her shoe as a cane. Gillis’ intense concentration and empathy gave the piece a profound resonance.

Afterward, it was oddly anticlimactic to see Gillis’ fitfully attractive but incoherently meandering 1983 piece, “Secret,” her peppy but overlong saga of a youngster who couldn’t stop dancing (“How the Rosehips Quiver,” also 1983) and the empty rapture of “Mercy” (1977), which could safely be dropped from the repertory of such a gloriously elemental dancer.