DANCE REVIEW : Choreography Carries Roe Show

Betzi Roe’s modern dance solo concert, performed Friday and Saturday at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, was the proverbial mixed bag. Movement styles, choreographic quality and theatrical effectiveness ranged from intriguing and successful to awkward and artistically weak.

The choreography, when good, was inspiring, and gave the evening its most satisfying moments. The weaknesses could have been improved with better production values--better lighting design and some fill for long, dead pauses between solos--and trimming of material.

Roe, a locally known dancer, dance teacher and choreographer, has been working solo for five years, creating short pieces of her own and collecting solos by other modern dance choreographers.

Her theme for the concert, as she explained in program notes, was the idea of “going west” into new frontiers for a new life, a sentiment probably more autobiographical than directly connected to the dances. If a theme is needed, the dances dealt, more than anything else, with being female in America.

In “Colinda,” Roe’s own choreography, she danced the hardship of a woman’s Midwestern pioneer life as described in Willa Cather’s novel, “My Antonia.” “Fragmented Flashback Blues,” by Long Beach-based choreographer Gloria Newman, reflected on the different lives of Roe’s grandmothers. Donald McKayle’s well-known dance, “Angelitos Negros,” addresses skin-deep beauty and self-worth, a monumental late-20th-Century issue for women.

Further, the first segment of “Landscape in Our Eyes,” a text-pantomime duet with actor Martin Katz, was a humorous day-in-the-life of a female high school student, complete with anguish over guys, parental restrictions, lack of time and teen-age ennui.

Roe is quite accomplished at pantomime. She knows body language in a Buster Keaton way, and even incorporated a few clowning gags in a too-cute middle segment of “Colinda.” Probably in an effort to lighten the hard-life mood of the piece, Roe inserted this upbeat flirtation with an invisible partner, while hanging out a line of laundry. Either one or the other would have been stronger, but not both. The pratfalls trivialized the serious sections, but they had more artistic possibility.

Roe has a penchant for playfulness and obvious shenanigans, which she demonstrated in two sections of “Landscape in Our Eyes.” For the dance-theater work, based on the writings of high school students, Roe and Katz were dressed in black street clothes and utterly comfortable on stage together enacting the teen-life dance. The second section of this work should have been cut. Roe acted best with her body; her spoken attempts were awkward. Though Katz’s acting was fine, his writing for this piece was abstruse.

Roe’s girlishness was apparent, too, in the concert’s strongest dance, “Flashback Blues.” Gloria Newman’s choreography, which was seamless and straightforward, did not illustrate the taped snippets of Roe’s voice remembering her grandmothers, but used the words as launching points for inventive movement phrases. In fact, Newman’s dance was so artistically sound, and so naturally executed by Roe, that the recitations were gratifyingly unnoticeable.

Roe set “Beyond the Boundary,” the concert’s final work, to the India-style chants of Sheila Chandra. This was a calm and deliberate Sheherazade telling stories with gestures. Roe’s arm configurations were sharply defined, artful and exciting in this dance, her strongest choreography on the program.