Dance Reviews : ‘Rituals’ a Time Warp From Donna Sternberg

Is there something incongruous about a bouquet being presented to a dance ensemble director after a performance in an old church gym with paint-chipped walls and metal folding chairs for the audience?

In the case of Donna Sternberg, less so than one would think. With five other women Friday at Immanuel Presbyterian, Sternberg harked back to a brand of modern dance commonly practiced in high school or college two decades ago.

Now, of course, with performance art and realism so much a part of the avant-garde scene, the notion of a “Rituals,” Sternberg’s 90-minute exercise dealing with sanctification, death, rebirth and--oh, yes--Pythagorean number theories and their qualities of sacredness, is hard to take at face value.

Actually, Pythagoras represented the best part of the evening in “Cosmos.” Here, George Kahn’s electronic score stimulated a pleasing combination of curving and linear movements with subtly changing patterns and interconnections between dancers.

But the crudity of the first three sections--conga-drum primitivism (courtesy of Bobby Matos) that animated much flinging, flailing, and melodramatic action with dancers in gauzy shmatte -tunics and with Meaningful looks being exchanged--did little to raise expectations.

Some of it looked like a “Saturday Night Live” parody, especially the cortege in which the heroine’s body is borne aloft, but schlepped across the floor and laid to rest with a shroud and palm leaf--not to mention towels ceremonially carried to sweating dancers whose faces then got mopped.

Somehow, flowers seemed perfectly in order here.