Dance and Music : Seismic Forces at Japan America Theatre

Loretta Livingston doesn’t fool around with little themes in her new work, the first part of a two-year project entitled “A History of Restlessness,” which received its premiere during the weekend at the Japan America Theatre.

Set to a commissioned sound score by Jeff Rona, Part I consists of five dances that attempt to show “how the great upheaval and shifts in the Earth’s history are enormous versions of the cataclysms that pass through human relationships,” according to press material provided in advance.

The whole work, we’re told, “overlays geological time and forces with the restlessness of human beings.”

Well, maybe. When Michael Mizerany made a series of lunging falls at the feet of an aloof Lynne DeMarco (in the opening “Ice Age”) Friday, perhaps some people could envision a shift in plate tectonics. But, more likely, they got caught up in the nasty interpersonal dynamics that developed as Mizerany sought to dominate DeMarco.

Livingston shuttled among evocations of vast, inhuman forces (Mizerany, David Plettner and Madeline Soglin overwhelmed by tidal waves in “Fault Zone”), images of support and conflict (DeMarco and Emily C. Stansberry in the agonistic “Relics”) and the sweetness of culture (Plettner and Soglin establishing agriculture and writing in the closing “Unread Petroglyph”).

The pivot point occurred in “Drift,” a hierophantic solo by Livingston, full of mysterious, comforting, emblematic gestures that cast their impact forward.

Livingston is a considerate, audience-friendly choreographer, isolating and, through repetition, emphasizing the movement motifs important in the work. One can readily appreciate the tapestry of interconnections she weaves among these elements.

Dancers crouch and roll over one another (sifting geological plates, again?), ratchet forward on their elbows, caress themselves in wavy, self-adorning gestures, flutter salutations, write or paint in the air. We see these and other movements again and again in different contexts, warmly or austerely lit by Doc Ballard, buoyed up or bludgeoned by Rona’s sounds.

When Plettner and Soglin rapidly ran through a number of these motifs to close the work, we felt satisfaction in the tight design and transformation of the elements. Yet somehow it remained more brainy than touching.

Still, the company executed the choreographer’s tough demands with exemplary clarity, control and apparent ease.

“The Archives,” a Twilight of the Gods segment of “A Window in the Passage,” a full-length work that received its premiere last year, completed the program. Saturday, “Elements” (another section of “A Window in the Passage”) and Livingston’s familiar solo, “Don’t Fall, Pomegranate,” were on the evening’s program.