DANCE REVIEW : Malashock Premieres Hold Surprises

Just before launching a program of new works, Friday in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA, choreographer John Malashock spoke to the audience about the unpredictability of live performance, supplying examples from his former career as a dancer with Twyla Tharp. As it happened, the final work in the three-part event added an ironic new anecdote to his collection.

With a concept credited to Malashock and Southland composer Michael Roth, “Their Thought and Back Again” featured two singers (Roxane Carrasco and Christine Phelps) who prowled the stage, interacting with the dancers and appearing to comment on their actions.

Unfortunately, you could understand only about one-tenth of the words they sang and thus felt increasingly deprived of crucial data and confused by major shifts in mood within what seemed to be an evolving narrative. No matter that the group dancing revealed a spectacular sense of surge along with meticulous character detail--or that Roth’s score vividly evoked music-theater styles from opera to musical comedy. Strain and frustration simply short-circuited the performance.

This reviewer asked for a copy of the text afterward and only then understood the playful, non-literal link between words and motion underpinning “Their Thought and Back Again.” Ironically, an audience able to hear Roth’s lyrics (mostly fragments of familiar phrases drawn from such sources as classified ads) would never have been as obsessed with them as some of us were on Friday.

Early in the evening, Malashock’s six-member, San Diego-based company displayed its prowess in pieces signaling a new, disarmingly lush phase of his creative development. Commissioned by the San Diego Symphony, “Souvenir de Florence” found him claiming for leotards a Tchaikovsky score that might seem more suited to tutus and tiaras.

Emphasizing the slow, powerful opening-out of the limbs into stretched, sculptural poses, this quintet kept its 20th-Century irreverence in focus through constant shifts in level, direction and dynamics as well as whimsical, anti-lyric gymnastic ploys set against some of the swooniest music. However, the unorthodox patterns of support in a duet for Gwen Hunter Ritchie and Francis Floro showed Malashock’s mastery of classical adagio traditions and his ability to extend them boldly.

Bathed in golden light, “The Near Reaches” strove for an archaic look that matched the lost world evoked in a suite of haunting 15th-Century Sephardic songs recorded by Hesperion XX. Indeed, you could argue that long before the dreamlike meetings, partings and group-caresses of the finale, the piece had grown nostalgically self-infatuated. Yet its best moments offered intriguing explorations of gender roles.

In the opening duet, for instance, Malashock reversed conventional partnering relationships by making Debi Toth the energizing, dominant cavalier figure and Floro the yielding, supple body-on-display. Both remained bare above the waist, with the contrast between her hard-muscled physicality and his softer look reinforcing the contemporary sexual politics defined in the movement.

Later on, Malashock pictorially developed the concept of female dominance but lost the strong back-to-the-future relevance that Toth and Floro had embodied so tellingly.