DANCE REVIEW : Livingston Troupe Premieres ‘Grandma Moses Project’

As a marketing device, Loretta Livingston’s “The Grandma Moses Project,” which received its premiere Saturday at the Wadsworth Theater in Westwood, is a canny step.

It will get Livingston’s company deservedly more prominence through national tour bookings. It will attract new audiences, especially families with younger children. It will reinforce nostalgia for a simpler, more gentle, pre-industrial America, whether it existed as shown here or anywhere.

What audiences will see are finely honed modern dancers who move with ease and clarity and unpretentious virtuosity.

What they won’t get is a sense of Livingston’s amply demonstrated capacity for challenging audiences, provoking thought and eliciting deep emotional responses.

Indeed, adults may find the lack of conflict and nuance sooner or later uninteresting.

The four parts of the work depict each season, beginning with spring. Each part moves from morning to evening.

Livingston abstracts everyday gestures and combines them with quicksilver movements, often freeze-framing the action to create clean, well-balanced pictures.

The choreographer plays the Americana values straight.

The Hired Girl (Lynne DeMarco) and Hired Man (Michael Mizerany) have a trusted place in the family. The Two Daughters (Emily C. Stansberry and Madeline Soglin) reflect perplexity or wide-eyed trust in the adult world. Perhaps there is dawning sexuality in their curious glances at the Hired Man. Perhaps not.

The rain at the end of the July Fourth picnic occurs predictably and endangers no one, nothing.

The only anxiety that enters this world comes when the kids stay out after dark, but even this is a joke on their parents (Livingston and David Plettner). Maybe the leave-takings at the end of winter mean more than just going out for a walk. Maybe not.

The characters are generic, they do not change, we learn nothing about them as individuals.

Martha Ferrara’s attractive, giant-quilt backdrop depicts a house that increasingly loses its panels as the work unfolds. This has an odd effect. By winter, when the family should have all the protection it can get, only a single panel remains. Yet Livingston doesn’t seem interested in deconstructing the values of this world.

Doc Ballard’s lighting scheme must be more subtle and sophisticated than the rather stark and sometimes crude contrasts seen at the Wadsworth.

Murielle Hamilton’s original score is serviceable and unprepossessing. It sounds already familiar through its borrowings from Copland, Barber, light jazz, easy rock and film music, as well as probably the most recently written imitation Scott Joplin rag.