MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : EAR Unit Meets L.A. Contemporary Dance Theater

Take a dance company and an avant-garde music ensemble. Join them, for an evening, at the hip. But don’t necessarily expect anything that resembles Merce Cunningham meeting John Cage.

Such expectations had to be dismissed Wednesday when Lula Washington’s Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theater met the California EAR Unit head on for what was heralded as a collaboration at Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

It simply wasn’t.

Instead, the two hardly encountered each other at all. Nor did they remain true to the artistic identity forged separately over the past years.

Washington’s creative inspiration has been in the realm of agitprop, dances dealing with social issues (recently, the L.A. riots and abortion rights). The EAR Unit, as purveyors of experimental music, has always taken substance to its collective heart.

But those attributes were nowhere to be found in “Off the Record,” a premiere that likely will also be a derniere. What the two did, if one can trust appearances, was improvise.

The EAR Unit played a rhythm accompaniment for most of the piece, while the dancers took turns strutting, finger-snapping, flailing and gyrating--taking up such props as telescopes and cameras along the way. True, there were a few choreographed routines: balleticisms applied to hip-hop.

But for what seemed like endless stretches the so-called collaboration meant solo exhibitions with electronic backup that gratefully developed, for a brief interval, into a gentle, tinkly brand of New Age music.

The evening’s first half featured worthier fare. “Cadeau,” by William Kraft, gave pianist Gloria Cheng and flutist Dorothy Stone the opportunity for their superb performances.

The piece--with its beguilingly French flavor and phantom essence, its dense sputterings and lyrical riffs--had one instrument playing off another. So was Earl Kim’s “Dear Linda” an artful counterbalance--between the spoken text of Ann Sexton’s letter to her daughter and the instrumentation.

What the setting brought to the lines, sensitively narrated by Robin Lorentz, was a dynamic absent from words that seemed nearly mundane on the page. Here was a true meeting of minds.