Dance : New Works at Caravan Opening

In a city in which high rents have savaged the availability of performance spaces, the opening of the Caravan Dance Studio in Hollywood ought to be cause for rejoicing. However, with few exceptions, the program of new dance and performance art offered there Friday was cause for dismay.

Operated by Tobi Redlich and Rachel van Dessel, the studio offers a performing area of about 35x35 feet. An audience of about 70 people can be accommodated through a mix of folding chairs and floor cushions. Be prepared to doff your footgear upon entry if you’re not wearing tennis shoes, however, to preserve the wood floor.

According to the program notes, Van Dessel is a student of an Oriental healing art called Qi Gong. Perhaps that accounts for her tensionless and pressureless movement style and her obsession with circular and wave patterns in her solo “Heart Channel Adagio” and duet “Desert Zheng” with Gene Evans.

However energizing or dis-energizing to the dancer, the works looked rather fey and precious from the outside.

Lock-step in a similar dreary minuet structure was Redlich’s balletic, obscurely feminist “A Million Loose Ends!” in which a Medusa-wigged Redlich clutched a coffee cup, lyrically pushed through yards of hanging fabric and eventually shoved herself halfway into a basket of rags. Who knows what it was about.

Towering about these in craft and kinetic interest, though described as a work in progress, was Rudy Perez’s “One Potato, Two Potato. . . .”

Perez built intricate fugal structures from cell motifs for his accomplished dancers Anne Goodman, Dura Snodgrass and Jeffrey Grimaldo. In addition to the ominous rumblings of an electronic score, cellist David Leahy provided the fixated, Bach-like arpeggios.

Although misshapen in proportion and lacking a conclusive ending, Molly Cleator’s “Whisper in the Dark” nevertheless had an actual subject--an incident of incest, whether real or imagined, and its consequences.