Dance Reviews : Mehmet Sander Company Performs at Highways

With its nonstop body-slams, brutal knee-drops and grueling group gymnastics, the choreography of Mehmet Memo Sander at first seems a form of public flagellation: dance as punishment.

However, Sander’s ongoing four-day engagement (through Sunday) at Highways in Santa Monica proves that mortifying the flesh isn’t so much his creative stance as one of his major themes.

Sander’s program biography describes him bluntly as “HIV+ and a Queer choreographer from Istanbul,” issues central to his work. For starters, the rigid geometric patterning of his pieces seems as much shaped by Turkish folk and ritual dance as by the postmodern choreographers with whom he studied.

The title of his nude solo “18” refers to the chapter in Leviticus forbidding nakedness and homosexuality. Here Sander tapes a long cross on the floor and hurls his body violently along, across and against its contours, with the spatial formality of the movement heightening the focus on an unyielding religious heritage.

Another Sander solo sets tightly circumscribed turns and falls against a sexually explicit soundtrack detailing a homosexual’s debasement by a policeman. At the end, when Sander lies exhausted, his physical vulnerability fuses with the verbal abuse in a statement about suffering and survival.

The title of the group piece “Action/Life” reverses the polarities of the AIDS activism slogan “Silence = Death,” and the work itself pushes Sander and three others to the limits of endurance, as if trying to burn a lifetime’s worth of energy in every moment.

If you are HIV-positive maybe you can’t count on that lifetime, maybe the moment is all there is. Maybe an artist with a sense of his predicament must memorialize the confrontations and relationships of that moment with as much fierce intensity as it can hold. Sander and his dancers hit the stage with unstinting force, but even when risking overkill--here and in the woman’s power quartet “Off Our Backs”--he leaves potent after-images and implications.

Two virtuoso showpieces confirm Sander as the first major discovery of the decade on the local scene--undeniably the young Turk of L.A. dance. The solo “Single Space” uses a wooden frame to show him literally boxed in, climbing the walls, hanging on the edge and finally coming out on top.

“Board Stiff” incorporates a portable 6-foot-square platform that becomes a precariously shifting floor under the four dancers and--as they lift it at various angles--a series of obstacles for them to conquer. In a cadenza of daring feats, they vault over it and roll under it (sometimes simultaneously), hang down the side, slide down the face and bear its weight when it comes crashing down.

You want a brilliant, energizing symbol for the risk and challenge of contemporary life? It’s at Highways through Sunday.