Gilliland and Ring Share ‘Twisted Spring’ Program : Dance: Music dominates LACE performance, which the generalized movement never matches.

Dance functioned like a low-wattage light show on both halves of the collaborative “Twisted Spring” program on Saturday at LACE. In each case, music dominated, displaying a moment-to-moment force and, above all, specificity that the generalized movement never matched.

In “Interrupting the Echo,” Stephanie Gilliland hung off a rope at floor level in the center of a circle of 20 suspended metal tubes that were struck, stroked and blown into by composer Butch Rovan and his assistants--the sound sometimes electronically modified or re-sequenced.

Adding to the musical mix: a wash of pebbles or seeds, rolled down a screen near the circle. Mick Gronek designed the sound sculpture for the performance and the aim appeared to be a meditative musical and visual environment that left the possibilities for dance restricted to defining rope-circles with the tube-circle.

Gilliland has always been a charismatic artist but her concentration kept getting fractured by the necessity of keeping out of the musicians’ way. (Why couldn’t they have worked outside the tube-circle?)

Moreover, both the metaphorical and kinetic potential of rope-dancing has been explored far more exhaustively by a decade’s worth of dancer-gymnasts from the Pilobolus extended family.

More moody ritual and meager dance came after intermission with “Untitled,” in which Melinda Ring danced in front of and behind three adjacent scenic paintings by Gary Matterson: a “Twilight Zone”-style space panorama (with a clock face, a skull and crossbones and the head of Abraham Lincoln drifting among the stars), a traffic scene and a castle facade with a huge, red clock-face superimposed on it.

An intense, varied pop score by the 4Gunas created more potent contexts for dancing, but Ring responded to every shift in spatial or musical emphasis with merely another variant on spine-lashing and head-tossing.

Yes, she came up with new, rudimentary steps, stances, special effects (shadow-dancing, for example). But, increasingly, her performance seemed irrelevant: an empty gesture by an intuitive artist who’d discovered no compelling reason to be onstage.