DANCE REVIEW : Lewitzky’s Mother-and-Child Reunion at Pepperdine

Bella Lewitzky used her annual benefit performance at Pepperdine University for two newsworthy purposes Sunday afternoon in the Smothers Theatre.

First off, Lewitzky revived two celebrated works from the 1960s--a preview of the extensive retrospective planned for her company’s upcoming 25th anniversary season. She then presented a special premiere: choreography very much in the Lewitzky tradition by her daughter, Nora Reynolds.

Previously a dancer in her mother’s company as well as the Lar Lubovitch and Mark Morris groups, Reynolds offered “Walking/Falling,” an expansion of a 1982 movement study both accompanied and inspired by Laurie Anderson’s music.

As Anderson’s recorded voice spoke of the loss of balance involved in locomotion (“with each step, you fall forward slightly”), five dancers explored this loss: leaning to the side until forced to support themselves with an arm, sinking into dependency upon a partner, teetering, staggering, collapsing.

Normally, Lewitzky dancers are paragons of control, so keeping them off-balance represented a genuine achievement--especially in Lori McWilliams’ punch-drunk solo and other forceful, high-velocity passages that confronted fear-of-falling and undermined its terrors.

For Reynolds’ generation, being at risk is simply the status quo and by domesticating gravity (or at least making it user-friendly), she suggested learning to accept the most precarious conditions of our existence.

Issues of balance also shaped Lewitzky’s 1969 “Orrenda (Oneness),” though here the dancers aimed for an ideal of steadiness, tilting back into drastically cantilevered extensions or forward into arabesques on half-toe while trying to remain perfectly centered.

Richly textured music by Cara Bradbury Marcus helped widen the implications of equilibrium to a universal principle.

Lewitzky developed intriguing contrasts among three couples, their actions conceptually similar but differentiated in shape and personality. She also used three additional women both to punctuate and frame the duets, eventually pulling everyone into a central cluster.

Like the tests of balance and the parallel actions in the duets, this cluster represented unity, the oneness of the title. However, as mentioned, Lewitzkian oneness left plenty of room for individuality--and, indeed, at the very end of “Orrenda” the cluster exploded into a starburst of component energies.

One of Lewitzky’s earliest works for her company, the 1966 “Trio for Saki,” used music by Dvorak in a relatively simple statement of elegiac lyricism.

With an emphasis on flow, Lewitzky’s three women reached upward--their arms drifting, floating, swimming overhead.

But small, sudden torso twists and sharp limb accents varied the smooth synchrony, just as shifts in tempo and unexpected, momentary linkups between dancers kept in focus a sense of emotional turbulence below the surface of the group ritual.

Lewitzky’s best work captures deep, meditative insights inside formal movement processes. Her current company can realize her movement design as skillfully as the content within, making her 25-year retrospective a unique opportunity to watch a new generation of artists interpret pioneer creations of Los Angeles dance.

The next installment: Sept. 14 at the Japan America Theatre.