DANCE REVIEW : Flamenco Flops in Malashock Work

The concept of a “work in progress” allows a creator to hone and revise. There’s no shame attached to the term. Playwrights and directors make heavy use of this step for theatrical productions, even minor ones, because misjudgments can be costly, depleting funds and hard-won reputations.

Choreographers, especially those who don’t have a home theater and who act as their own theater directors, rarely have the luxury of trying out ambitious dance-theater works. Dances that are unsuccessful get dropped from the repertory, but only after the damage is done.

Local choreographer John Malashock premiered a new work Friday night at the Don Powell Theater on the SDSU campus, in the first of three concerts over the weekend presented by the SDSU Associated Students Cultural Arts Board.

The new dance, a collaboration obscurely titled “Labyrinth of the Green Horse,” featured guest choreographer Yaelisa, who is a flamenco dancer and co-directs the San Diego-based Solera Flamenco Dance Company with guitarist Bruce Patterson, who strummed flamenco rhythms on Spanish guitar for the performance.

Let’s hope this work progresses radically through artistic re-evaluation or quietly disappears from the Malashock Dance & Company repertory. At present, “Labyrinth” offers nothing to the body of work Malashock has been slowly building over the past six years.

Patterson’s live accompaniment energized, as much as it could, this particularly boring piece, plagued by stereotypical sexist roles and embarrassing story-dance cliches.

The moon (Yaelisa), archetypal symbol for the female, is omnipresent as a character, a flamenco dancer, who seems to compel human “lunacy” in a melodramatic romance of eroticism, jealousy and violence.

A prudish mother of repressed sexual desire (Maj Xander) has two sons. The oldest (Greg Lane), a macho womanizing husband who brutalizes his wife (Debi Toth), fights his younger brother (John Malashock) over a female “stranger”(Loni Palladino), after the younger brother has sex with her. The younger brother kills the older one in a slow-motion dance-spar sequence.

The mother, angry over the loss of her favorite son, strangles the youngest one with her shawl and lowers him, also in slow motion, to the floor by his neck.

By this end, some women in the audience were snickering. The tragedy just wasn’t tragic; the dance was emotionally hollow, and the behaviors--as when Malashock caressed the extended leg of Palladino Latin-lover style or slowly moved his hands down her chest--were predictable.

Flamenco is a intoxicating synthesis of dance, jutted-chin and arched-back posturings, vocals, calls, and musical accompaniment. Executed with contrasting angular and serpentine gestures and hard and fast heel work, the movement can be aggressively seductive or simply beautiful in the abstract.

One can appreciate Malashock’s desire to experiment with flamenco, but Yaelisa’s dancing, although fluid and accomplished, is limited and passionless, mostly consisting of over-the-head arm movement, with little footwork or full-body momentum. Malashock’s work needs the passion and dynamism.

One can also understand that he would be attracted to a story line for a change. His dances tend to avoid traditional dramatic structures, instead, hovering in a monotonic realm. Odd movement inventions shift from one series to the next without marked changes in tempo or expressive intensity.

Two such works were on the program. “Where the Arrow Landed,” set to segments of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’ music, and “The Barn Owl Lingers,” similarly set to Leos Janacek pieces, share a theme of disintegration. Both are lyrical, with to-the-music sequences, and both interject disjointed, quirky incongruities, as a comment on contemporary anxiety and alienation.

These two works are not gripping or emotionally engaging, but both keenly attend to visual polish. Moreover, as dance and theater, both make “Labyrinth,” by comparison, a droopy disappointment.

Dancers Lane, Palladino, Toth and Xander performed confidently in all three works. Each possesses clarity of form and fluency in the Malashock lexicon. Lane even outdanced Malashock, giving a welcome buoyancy and a lack of self-consciousness to “Arrow” and “Barn Owl.”