Dance : Nina Wiener Dance Co. Brings ‘Landscapes’ to UCLA

Nina Wiener’s new “Harmonic Landscapes,” seen Friday at Royce Hall, UCLA, sums up a decade in which American Post-modern dance changed from something rigorous and essential into a decorative art.

Here, in an hourlong collaboration with composer Andy Teirstein and designer Keso Dekker, Wiener offers what she calls “a travel book of different places and relationships,” based on a visit to Australia, where she was struck by “the dichotomy between the urban and the primitive.”

Thus Teirstein’s score supplies telling contrasts between harmonica and Jew’s harp, and between strings and nature effects. Dekker provides a multilayered setting: panels embossed with horizontal strips of vertical lines that lower in to redefine the dance space in any increment between the wide-open (no panels) and the oppressively congested.

Dekker dresses the dancers in what looks like tasseled black open-weave over colored unitards. The tassels (actually more like cloth flaps) shimmer when the dancers move and help neutralize gender distinctions, one of Wiener’s familiar choreographic priorities.

Others include keeping the dancers off balance and emphasizing arm motion. To these concerns, “Harmonic Landscapes” adds surging, panoramic responses to the shifting spatial contexts defined by Dekker’s set, plus deft playoffs between the centered and sometimes slithery “primitive” dancing versus the rigid verticality and choppy, task-oriented mime of the “urban” sequences.

There’s also a tentative foray or two into direct emotional expression (principally a section at the end of Act I with dancers gesturing and emoting on chairs).

Wiener’s seven dancers superbly translate Proustian allusion into virtuoso physicality in performances as notable for sustained energy as meticulous control.

Yet they can’t provide the visceral experience missing in Wiener’s style. Only briefly, in the solo for Torrin Cummings at the start of Act II and a few other points, does any torso motion deepen and connect the isolated activity for upper and lower limbs. And, of course, an estranged artist can scarcely express an integrated viewpoint.

“Harmonic Landscapes” comes from a sensibility that makes painful cultural dichotomies into gleaming movement riffs. Everything Wiener saw or felt in Australia is now distilled into cool, cryptic design: stage design, body design, a gallery mindset. Never has abstraction seemed so much an evasion, or a choreographer with such brilliant resources so profoundly irrelevant.