DANCE REVIEW : Bielemeier, Lewis Pair Up for Disappointing Double Bill

Dancer-performer Gregg Bielemeier and ballet choreographer Terri Lewis may be about as artistically similar as apples and oranges, but since they’re both winners of City of Pasadena Arts Commission awards, they shared a bill Thursday at the Armory Center for the Arts.

For different reasons, both were disappointments: the wonderfully inventive Bielemeier because he appears still to be recovering from injuries (he danced with an ankle brace and seemed low on energy) and Lewis because she keeps churning out story-ballets that have all the sophistication of greeting cards.

Bielemeier opened the program with “Squint . . . it’s a waltz,” a short take in which the underwear-clad dancer found himself happily ensnared in the strap of an old-fashioned exercise machine.

“Never Danced Nude,” a duet with Debra Levine, offered a contemporary reconstruction of romance-dance a la Ginger and Fred, with the two proceeding through various states of undress in the work’s four segments.

Bielemeier rounded out his half of the bill with two more solos: “Commotion Communique,” an athletic dance full of twirls and gestural commentary, and “In Time in Place,” a one-liner featuring dancer-as-freeway. In the latter, Bielemeier danced with a long, black train of fabric extending from his costume, as car sounds provided background.

The Terri Lewis Dance Ensemble, a chamber ballet company, weighed in with three dances. “Gallery” featured two women looking at art. The voice-over included quotes from the Pasadena’s Choice catalogue: the literature for the art actually hanging on the walls of the gallery in which the dance was presented.

“At Delphi,” set in ancient Greece, offered exactly the kind of cliched supplications you’d expect if you’ve seen any B-movie about gods and oracles. Likewise, “Two/Time,” ably danced at moments by Patricia Morgan and Aaron Jennings, brought nothing new to the topic of relationships.

The difference between Bielemeier and Lewis is not so much that they work in different idioms, but that she is utterly lacking in the self-conscious modernism that is his winning stock-in-trade.

Their dances may all be of recent vintage, but Lewis is inscribing thematic and stylistic tracts that are at least a decade old.