Dance Reviews : Duo Brings a Sense of Play, Chaos to Highways

Dancers Chazz Dean and Kurt Fulton may try to cover more conceptual bases than are good for us. In an appearance Friday as part of the Dance Traffic series at Highways in Santa Monica, they performed two works with a sense of play, creative chaos and exuberance. But they may have blown as many points as they scored.

Usually speaking in unison but occasionally overlapping the same statements, the two deftly performed pieces that parodied and analyzed the straight and gay worlds and the perilous communications between the two.

Their movement vocabulary incorporated a blitz of calisthenics, sports gestures, traffic-directing, flag-waving, ditch-digging, disco gyrating, tease-and-come-hither posturings, sadomasochistic rituals, stop-action poses and who knows what else. Their fluid shifts between macho poses and their opposites provided devastatingly funny critiques of both extremes.

Structured more like a collection of short stories than a novel, the seven-part “Sodomite Warriors” deepened from a witty if hyper cabaret act, through a spoof of a gay marriage, to an earnest plea, directed to the audience without apparent stage personality, for acceptance of gays. The pivotal point may have been Dean’s line in the “Teen-age Forbidden Fruit” section: “It hurts so bad, I’m such a freak, I hate myself.”

With its churning mix of serious and trivial questions and statistics (without contexts, and from what sources?), the opening piece, “2000 Questions,” intended to demonstrate that things are going to hell in a hand-basket, rapidly devolved into a mimed series of the kind of sound-bite thinking that, with other messages, the two dancers might deplore.