Dance, Music Reviews : Pilobolus Performs at Pepperdine

In its first 20 years, Pilobolus Dance Theatre and its offshoots explored movement techniques, vocabularies and image systems developed from sports and other disciplines that formerly had remained outside the concept of dance.

At 21, however, in the inevitable period of conservatism preceding the end of a century, the company’s vaunted dexterity has shrunk to displays of partnering prowess and its artistic ambitions to recycling modern-dance truisms.

Most of the works on the program at Pepperdine Thursday defined relationships through gymnastic partnering. Even the Alison Chase solo “Axons” soon became a showy duet between dancer and jacket--the garment tossed and punched in such a way that it remained suspended in space as if it were alive.

Created for a man, the solo assumed new implications as performed by Jude Woodcock: Wearing and assaulting that jacket, for instance, now seemed a statement about a woman’s acceptance and rejection of male values. But the opening passage on gymnastic rings and the section executed in push-up position looked stuck together with no organic kinship.

Equally arbitrary: the shifting patterns of dominance and submission traced by Kent Lindemer and Woodcock in Michael Tracy’s comic duet “Clandestiny.” The work’s extremes involved her throwing herself at him (launching unusual lifts) or him becoming so dizzy that for long passages she could hurl him around like a rag doll. Impressive execution again sustained a disjointed premise.

Choreographed by Tracy, Chase, Jonathan Wolken and Robby Barnett in collaboration with the six members of the original cast, “New Work” boasted atmospheric scrim projections and the bravura, no-hands group partnering that also distinguished the familiar collaborative men’s piece, “The Particle Zoo,” on the same program.

Here, however, Woodcock and Rebecca Jung, along with one of their male colleagues (not always the same one) often became passive objects to be displayed in high, overhead triptych-lifts or slung over their partners’ shoulders. The effortless manipulation of body weight again proved spectacular but, after two decades, some of us expect more from Pilobolus than merely an itinerant partnering lab.

Adam Battelstein danced Wolken’s early solo “Pseudopodia” with easy mastery of its non-stop tumbling challenges. Chase’s “Moonblind” solo was canceled due to Jung’s ankle injury.