Dance Reviews : Long Nguyen Performs His Works at Highways

Vietnam-born Long Nguyen has an elfin presence, a quicksilver body and the ability to invoke a range of images and emotions with sparing words and gestures. But the frustrating thing about Nguyen’s dances--seen Saturday night at Highways--is that they seem to have become less personal and complex during the last few years.

Best of all was “Translation,” from 1984. While skittering, bouncing, spinning or making gestures imbued with traces of ritual, Nguyen talks about fleeing Saigon during the Tet Offensive, watching the war on TV, having a brother in the U.S. Air Force and an uncle who works as a dishwasher and learns American slang.

Much is conveyed by context and movement alone (like the still, seated figure with an upraised palm who has obviously burned himself in protest). The seeming nonchalance that buoys the piece--the ingenuousness of a little hop or a heel-and-toe dance or a silly rhyme or snatch of song--is really about survival, adaptation and grief so extreme it goes underground.

In Nguyen’s premiere, “Ode to the Dance Maker” (to an uncredited trio by Mendelssohn, and with a backdrop by Scott Hendricks), he interrupts a conventionally lyrical dance for a couple (Nanette Cresto and Chuck Burks) by walking onstage with a cheery wave. The contrast in styles is piquant--you expect a clash between old-fashioned romantics and a casual, 20th-Century guy. Alas, Nguyen plays it straight, slogging through uneventful partnerships with both Cresto and Burks.

“I See Red”--a solo romp in a billowing red robe and G-string--seems too straightforward to be a spoof of Isadora Duncan, yet too generalized to be an homage. While Nguyen’s lithe delicacy serves him well in “Strange Relation” (to an excerpt from an unnamed Vietnamese opera), his choreography for Cresto and Burks sags into routine lunges and feints in “Gnomon.”