DANCE REVIEW : Transitions Company Flirts With Frenzy at LACE

A performing wing of the Laban Centre in London, Transitions Dance Company came to LACE on Tuesday with five pieces displaying the exemplary strength, stamina and control of a nine-member ensemble. Forget nuance: These dancers were out for conquest.

Artistic director Sean Greene (formerly with the Bella Lewitzky company) and artistic adviser Bonnie Bird (a member of Martha Graham’s original company) assembled a program in which the dancers’ individual qualities helped color, vary and deepen repetitive group pieces exploiting punishing athleticism.

Same-sex partnering recurred throughout the evening as did statements about the breakdown (or hopelessness) of relationships. In Della Davidson’s brooding “Judith,” forceful, spasmodic movement in three spatial planes would suddenly yield to brief gestural “snapshots” of emotive data: praying hands, brutal sexual couplings, women keening over men’s bodies.

Yolande Snaith’s “Public Place, Private Thoughts” and Herve Jourdet’s two-part “Crabs” each featured violent juxtapositions of documentary movement motifs: waiting-room behavior (expanded into a feverish nightmare) in the former piece, beach activities (reshaped for maximum eccentricity) in the latter. An antic male duet early in “Crabs” reduced provocative sexual issues to sight gags but provided a flashy vehicle for Darren Ellis and Anton Loxha.

These three works all accelerated to points of interactive frenzy, depicting situations in danger of going out of control. In contrast, the climactic acceleration in Mary Evelyn’s cool, expert “Maninya 1” simply capped the progression of sleek, formal, linked dance-sculptures evolving in the piece from the start.

Finally, Claude Brumachon’s “Naufrages” quickly became so intimidating--with the dancers continually slamming onto the floor, hurling themselves at one another, lashing their heads and, most startling of all, intercutting these ordeals with courtly poses drawn from Fragonard--that no coda was necessary.

By merely stopping in a living freeze-frame, they reaped all the accumulated intensity of the piece and released the beast in the audience. LACE is probably still echoing with the dog-yelps.