DANCE REVIEW : Uchizono Just Short of Cutting Edge

“New art” sometimes is created by taking apart “old” art--down to the screws. How all the elements are reassembled--in unlikely ways or with unusual materials--can have humorous, inspiring, and, at best, innovative effects.

Sometimes, however, the new machine looks great and makes all the right noises but doesn’t work. Not yet, anyway.

Such was the problem with the the New York-based contemporary dance troupe Donna Uchizono & Company, which opened Neofest, Sushi’s annual Festival of the New Arts, Thursday night.

Uchizono’s choreography is similar to a dense sequence of unfinished sentences, fully possessed of enticing sound but lacking a poetic core.

One witnesses a language of movement “in process” as she tries on and casts off one gestural reference after another. Everything and more--from convulsive shaking, toggling heads, pelvic rolls, puppet dancing, martial arts sparring and Hindu gesture dances to a Polynesian hula--are mixed within the contemporary frame of objectivist dance evolved from Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Lucinda Childs, for example, and from Twyla Tharp’s stylized works.

Uchizono danced the 10-minute solo “Siren” for the 45 to 50 in attendance at Sushi’s performance space on 8th Avenue. (The company’s final performance is tonight at 8 p.m.) Set to steady one-two drum beats overlaid with strains of amplified cello, the dance moved within a narrow corridor of space, first focusing on hands and arms in gestures that alternated between the sinuous “come hithers” of a mythological siren to fierce, agitated slashings at the air. Next, Uchizono focused on leg and foot movements before a frenzied, full-body stretto-like finish.

“San Andreas,” the program’s full-company final piece, begins with a brief solo “prelude” titled “Short Tahitian Temper,” which Uchizono danced in red silks to traditional Tahitian drums. With her back to the audience, she shook and shimmied at the hips, pounded them down at the waist and turned her head only once to show a violently cursing face. A raised fist and scream ended the temper tantrum before the lights blacked out.

Is this the angry god that causes the Earth to shift along fault lines?

According to the Neofest brochure, “San Andreas” uses a fault line as a “metaphor for the fragility and tension of our lives,” and frequently throughout the dance, Phillip Adams, Conor McTeague, Jodi Melnick, and Shelly Senter lined up with Uchizono, all dancing barefoot with vacant expressions, sometimes in unison, and sometimes in polyphase variations, before breaking apart.

Again, Tom Cora’s music, amplified cello and percussion, sets the tone. To serene and even rhythmic sounds, the dancers undulated or paced nonchalantly. When Jimi Hendrix seemed to invade the score, the work was dominated by reckless dives, crashing and bumping partners, and crazed darting.

But nothing lasted for long, neither fragility nor tension. Whatever Uchizono set out in her choreography, she immediately snatched back, with one happy exception--a hula with tongue-in-cheek interpolations. As the men and women “signed” the hula in unison, swaying at the hips and winding extended arms, Uchizono softly sang the typical blue-mountain, clear-waters translation. One of the dancers fell out of line and went on a flailing binge; another dropped out spasmodically, subversively, giving the “other side of the story” to amusing effect.

The 45-minute piece closed with the dancers facing the audience, in line and looking down as if looking over “the edge.” It’s the edge Uchizono needs to explore--to cross over with her ideas--so that her dance language can jump beyond the post-modern assemblage it is.