DANCE REVIEWS : Mehmet Sander Company at L.A. Theatre Center

Falling may be the first human fear and it is certainly the one confronted the most unsparingly in the movement rituals created by Turkish choreographer and Long Beach resident Mehmet Sander.

Reiterated throughout a powerful six-part Sander company program at the Los Angeles Theatre Center on Saturday, the unprotected body slam helped define a new virtuosity founded as much on what the body can withstand as what it can do. Forget the dancer-as-hero--survival is the watchword here.

Sander and his four colleagues continually fall full-force (dead-weight) face down or drop onto their backs or crash into walls or ram into one another. In the solo “18,” Sander hurls himself against a huge cross taped on the floor (symbol of an inflexible religious tradition). In “Board Stiff,” four dancers manipulate a huge wooden platform that not only determines their movement choices but (as it is swung around and tipped over) becomes a physical threat as well.

Among the newest pieces, “Initiation of Movement” uses a multicolored gym mat to explore the ways the human body and gravity can interact. Sometimes the dancers whirl in space like pinwheels before hitting the mat. Sometimes they cleave the air like dolphins and the tension between the illusion of freedom in such movements and the inevitability of a bone-crunching fall gives the piece a poignancy, even a sweetness, missing in Sander’s relentlessly patterned earlier group work “Action/Life.”

In the familiar solo “Single Space,” Sander escapes from confinement in a box-frame. For the more recent “Inner Space,” he’s crammed inside a plastic cube along with Lucianne Aquino and Alan Panovich. Can they co-exist, much less escape? Yes, indeed, but not before a display of the perhaps the most intimately coordinated movement Sander has yet attempted.

The drama of Sander’s choreography comes from the way human speed and dexterity triumph over unyielding forms--whether architectural constructions (the box, the board, the cube) or formal movement processes.

Gravity, obviously, is the most unyielding of all laws, and Sander cannot resist defying it with dazzling impudence. Even so, miking the floor (and adding echo-chamber effects) may be unwise--a florid ornament to choreography otherwise locked in perpetual combat with the bottom line.