Dance Reviews : Collage Theatre Offers ‘Out of Circulation’

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Heidi Duckler’s new “Out of Circulation” ought to be funnier than it is. Or nastier than it is.

After all, this local site-specific choreographer is known for satirizing Americans’ love affair with cars and phones and limited women’s roles and fashions and a few other restrictive obsessions.

But this time, it’s hard to figure the point of the piece, presented Saturday at the Santa Monica Public Library by Duckler and the other members of her Collage Dance Theatre.

The audience enters the building, signs up for a so-called temporary library card, passes an invitation to donate some money to the troupe ($10 is the suggested sum, even though the program was billed as being free), affixes a fingerprint to an entry pass and heads upstairs to watch the goings-on in the lobby below.

The frame is a murder mystery text by Merridawn and Garrick Duckler, who pun unmercifully on the opportunities provided by the site. Some samples: “He was out of circulation,” “The case was stacked against her” but because of insufficient evidence, “they never could have booked her.”

Duckler enacts a “librarian with libido” as she writhes and wriggles and humps her desk and her automatic pencil sharpener and--on tape--barks suggestive orders to five assistant office workers (Debi Albeyta, Ilaan Egeland, Karyn Klein, Andrew Ogilvie and Michael-Vaughn).

The five start out as anxious test-takers, who begin to cheat, then energetically pursue each other in drawn-out sex and power games, as Duckler remains an observant, later manic presence.

All this to Carla Lucero’s taped jazz score, which ranges from laid-back to suspenseful.

But what are we laughing at, and why? Who are these people, and why should we care about them?

In a letter to supporters, the choreographer says the piece is about “control and voyeurism.”

Using a librarian as an example of a sexually repressed and repressive person may have been a novel idea, say, circa 1904, but surely not any more. Since the audience is forced to observe the dancers from above, perhaps some self-reflective insights should arise. But audiences are always looking at dancers. That’s what they’re there for.

“Out of Circulation” points in several directions but manages not to advance very far in any one of them.