DANCE REVIEW : Academic ‘Episode’ From Lewitzky

Bella Lewitzky’s latest creation offers a master class in dance composition--a chance to watch the choreographer use an ordinary, revolving piano-stool as a platform for dancing, a spatial nucleus and a unifying structural premise.

Introduced to local audiences on Friday during an otherwise familiar three-part Lewitzky Company program at Keck Theater, Occidental College, “Episode 2: Portraits” begins with a moody solo for Ken Talley on that stool, but soon emphasizes academic formalism over character. The ensuing sections for Li Chun Chang, Nancy Lanier and Walter Kennedy do sketch personality traits and even relationships, but the stool always remains central to the action.

Chang’s swiveling steps evoke it; Lanier and Kennedy’s duet involve it in daring tests of balance-in-rotation and everyone eventually runs rings around it until it assumes the prominence of a fifth dancer.

The bench in “Episode 1: Recuerdo” and the billowing draw-curtains in “Impressions 2: Vincent Van Gogh” on the same program also frame and condition Lewitzky’s choreography, but not to this extent. “Recuerdo” has a powerful emotional statement to deliver about memory and loss--one made all the stronger Friday by Theodora M. Fredericks’ triumphant comeback from major injury.

“Vincent Van Gogh” alternates sculptural character tableaux with surging, large-scale group sections called “landscapes” in an attempt to suggest both the scope and the intensity of Van Gogh’s art. The agenda for “Episode 2,” however, allows no statement of feeling or perception except those related to the revolving stool. As a result the work displays a cool, postmodern purity but may lack the resonance of Lewitzky’s finest dances.