DANCE REVIEW : The Limits of Lewitzky, Stoltzman

The audience for the Lewitzky Dance Company had fair warning Saturday in Royce Hall: a program sheet devoting just one paragraph to information about choreographer Bella Lewitzky and four to clarinetist Richard Stoltzman.

Before the house lights dimmed, ushers made sure that everyone was seated for Stoltzman’s spotlit entrance down the aisle at the beginning of “Glass Canyons,” and soon the Lewitzky dancers faced the unusual task of clearing space onstage for a music man hell-bent on becoming a performance artist.

Continually moving his chair to and from center stage, sometimes encircled and even lifted by company members, Stoltzman tentatively interacted with the dancers as he played along with prerecorded piano and percussion tracks--another tactic (like the drastic over-amplification) that kept him artificially prominent.

The score by William Thomas McKinley allowed Stoltzman generous opportunities to improvise, to show his breath control at daunting range extremes and to venture high-velocity filigree. Unfortunately, it also shackled Lewitzky to 20 minutes of clarinet dynamics--a challenge she met diffidently with generalized group scamperings, off-the-rack gymnastics and endless costume changes.

Commissioned by UCLA, UC Berkeley, Northeastern University and Chamber Music Chicago, “Glass Canyons” had all the symptoms of Toxic BAM Syndrome, a pervasive impresario’s disease of the 1980s that left stillborn collaborations and other manufactured events strewn across the cultural landscape. Happily, Lewitzky’s Saturday program proved only partially tainted.

In “Episode 1: Recuerdo” (reviewed at its November premiere in Irvine), Lewitzky created a potent dramatic quintet about memory that recalled the stark pertinence of early modern dance. Theodora Fredericks danced the leading role with magnificent authority and, if possible, looked even better in the extraordinary opening solo of “Agitime,” Lewitzky’s sardonic 1989 survey of debased American values.

The solo’s components seemed familiar enough: a stripper bumping and grinding in lurid colored light to bluesy music.

But both Lewitzky and composer Larry A. Attaway brilliantly deconstructed their documentary sources, recombining fragments of movement and sound in a collage conveying the emptiness of this kind of performance, its manipulation of participant and spectator.

Other sections explored disposable relationships, desperation in the workplace, authoritarian oppression--subjects keyed to scenic paintings by Kevin Miller that fit together like pieces in a neo-Expressionist puzzle.

The dancing, too, knit together in increasingly complex structures, with some company members achieving spectacular flair: Walter Kennedy, for example, in the surging finale and, especially, John Pennington in the businessman’s solo. Yet Lewitzky and Attaway never again became so incisive or inspired as when dissecting the techniques and assumptions of popular entertainment.

Over the years, Lewitzky’s press interviews have periodically revealed her profound distaste for show business, and the opening “Agitime” solo suggests both a depth of feeling and a wealth of perception on the subject that might yield a memorable full-length work--assuming she’s not too busy glorifying narcissistic clarinetists.