Dance : Malashock’s Intense Iconoclasm

Dismay hits you hard at the very first glimpse of John Malashock’s new dance suite, “The Barn Owl Lingers,” introduced Friday at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

Dressed in elegant streak-dyed Romantic shifts and tunics, Malashock’s five-member modern dance ensemble sweeps gracefully through aristocratic, linear formations to music by Janacek (played live by a chamber ensemble). Hands curl and feet point balletically, faces project poetic sensitivity--and as you sink lower and lower in your chair, your consternation starts turning to anger.

Malashock, after all, has embodied the most intense contemporary iconoclasm ever since he formed his San Diego-based company five years ago. Detailing the despair and fury of failed relationships, he forged a modern-dance style remarkable for physical risk and rigor as well as unpredictability. What on earth caused him to abandon all that for the prettified rhetoric of classroom ballet?

A particularly nasty game plan, as it turns out. While we watch “The Barn Owl Lingers,” every passage of sticky lyricism begins to disintegrate into grotesque and spasmodic fragments. Limbs begin to shake fearfully, steps become convulsive stamps, formal partnering stops and people cling to one another in terror.

It gets stranger still. Debi Toth pushes Greg Lane’s extended leg up and down as if he’s a water-pump. Lane uses Toth’s head as a basketball in a dribbling maneuver that others eventually copy. And everyone springs, over and over, into push-up positions along the floor: sweating, out-of-breath, in extremis .

Through all this, Malashock shows the refined notions of Romanticism that ballet embraced contrasted with the madness, obsessive individuality and morbid indulgence that make that era in art, music and literature increasingly relevant to our time. Defying our expectations adds a dark comic twist to the experience. As “Twin Peaks” warned us, owls are not what they seem--and Malashock’s “Barn Owl” is a sardonically devious critter indeed.

Malashock’s new theater piece, “Apologies From the Lower Deck,” explores a related issue: the past’s hold on the present--or, rather, the past destroying the present. Using an atmospheric score by Mark Attebery and a powerful, slippery text by Michael Erickson, the choreographer depicts five cousins returning to Sardinia after the earthquake deaths of their parents.

This will be a fatal journey, but what interests Malashock most of all is the cousins’ motives, so he focuses text, music and movement on a shared internal voyage.

Malashock uses an actor, Steve Pearson, to define the cousins’ perceptions--but though he speaks for them, he’s not exactly godlike.

One by one, in character solos of great economy and a surging, liquid style, they reveal their essences--with Malashock’s troubled Gianni increasingly the central figure. It is his glimpse of freedom that forms the work’s final illusion: a miraculous happy ending that turns out to be nothing more than a drowning man’s delirium.

Although “Apologies From the Lower Deck” periodically succumbs to the prevalent danger of text-based work--making dance merely the illustration in an event dominated by the spoken word--we do come to know these cousins deeply and to care about their sufferings and fantasies.

That’s as much hope as Malashock ever offers: the possibility that someone will understand and empathize. But it’s enough in this masterfully constructed and superbly danced collaboration to confirm his reputation as the Southern California choreographer most in touch with the panic and isolation of contemporary life.

Malashock’s familiar “Take This Waltz” completed the program, a presentation by the adventuresome Sushi Performance Gallery.