DANCE REVIEW : Six Solo in in Varied ‘Prime Moves’

In the same space housing “Dance Kaleidoscope,” a producer of the “Black Choreographers” festival has launched “Prime Moves,” a showcase of Southern California dance that once again emphasizes variety.

Six soloists appeared on the series’ opening program, Friday at the Cal State Los Angeles Playhouse, with an equally diverse lineup of groups scheduled for next weekend.

Sampler programming of this sort obviously looks attractive to funding sources these days. But it also implies that pros and amateurs, artists and poseurs, commercial dance and the avant-garde are all pretty much the same and somehow belong together.

Twice in the last month, Loretta Livingston has lent excerpts from longer pieces to this kind of event, and the intricate gestural gambits of her solo “Drift” (from “A History of Restlessness”) certainly looked different, different, different from both the post-Cunningham structuralism of Gus Solomons Jr. that preceded her and the classic butoh Angst of Oguri that followed.

Compulsively sculpting space at high speed, Livingston capitalized on brilliantly realized shifts of scale--micro to macro and back--executed with the intensity of a young animal at serious play. In contrast, Oguri’s new “One’s Solo Blue” worked to build up and deepen a mood of nameless dread through positional and especially facial detail. The clawlike hands and broken-body grotesquerie risked horrorshow overkill, but his remarkable concentration kept tension unbroken.

In “You Can’t Just Put a Band Aid on Your Brain,” Solomons wore a costume embellished with small buttons, rings, tassels, flaps and patches of fringe that individually moved or glittered when he danced. This focus on isolated centers of motion also dominated the choreography--until Solomons began expressing feelings of exhaustion, frustration and anger that clashed with the patterning of his ostensible movement text. Was this pillar of postmodernism dramatizing its death? His fascinating exploration of artistic conflict suggested no less.

For all its spasms of gutsy dancing, Tamica Washington’s new “With All Due Respect” never found a choreographic shape to hold its theme: honoring important women in her life, including her mother, Lula. Filled with flatly spoken autobiographical inanities, the solo flung a list of names at the audience as if that alone were a worthy tribute--exactly what her mother reportedly did in “Circle of Dance” earlier this month. As the twig is bent. . . .

Recent Emmy winner Michael Peters dabbled in picturesque Judeo-Christian sanctimony during the first two sections of his new “In Search of Faith,” and then, to a Rod Stewart hit, added a feelgood pop dance showpiece that served his talents and those of dancer Edgar Godineaux far more impressively. Yes, yes, we all understood how this finale exalted individual faith over institutionalized religion, but, somehow, Godineaux’s bravura butt-wiggling failed to keep the focus on spirituality.

In the “Cruciation” section of his “Red Faced and Bony,” Steven Craig used movement of the upper torso and, especially, arms to define a spectrum of pain and despair. Spare and purposeful, the solo was originally danced nude, but on this occasion Craig found himself under pressure to cover up and unwillingly did so.