WEEKEND REVIEWS : Dance : Compelling Visions in ‘Borders’

Superficially a showcase for what a program note called “the great cultural, ethnic and artistic diversity that is Los Angeles,” the “Dance Without Borders” series at the Japan America Theatre over the weekend had an unacknowledged unity worth considering.

Some of the company leaders/choreographers were gay men and, in a better world than this, the three-night event would have been an occasion for gay pride--a testament to the dazzling range, innovation and influence of homosexual modernism.

In 1994, however, diversity means race and even artists aren’t allowed to belong to more than one minority--at least not on major stages.

Ending Sunday with Donald Byrd’s full-evening ensemble piece “Bristle” (reviewed earlier), the series proved especially memorable for its solos. On Friday, Rudy Perez projected AIDS consciousness as a crisis of faith in the brooding “Remain in Light” (“Can I Bear All the Red Ribbons”) from 1991. Using a rope rosary and a strip of crimson cloth, he numbly measured his despair and then--in a passage as horrific as its model in Martha Graham’s “Cave of the Heart”--desperately tried to devour it.

On Saturday, Jeffrey Grimaldo danced Perez’s sardonic 1993 “Agenda,” ricocheting from statements of vulnerability to increasingly rigid expressions of control that culminated in a lifeless, mechanical machismo.

Equally obsessed with issues of control and also, arguably, with unyielding concepts of manhood, “Spacetimegravity” on Friday found Mehmet Sander attempting to execute the same headstands, flips and full-force body-slams on three different surfaces: a flat gymnastic mat, a ramp at a 45-degree angle and a wall straight up from the floor. Of course, he succeeded--heroically.

The first part of Naoyuki Oguri’s “Protestation: Silent Shout” seemed a demonstration of the fierce concentration and amazing physical displacements of Japanese butoh. Bald, earth-colored, and wearing only a genital sock, this former pupil of the great Min Tanaka looked new to his body, trying out grotesque systems of motion suggesting some primordial creature walking upright for the first time.

A sequence with a large mirror linked the audience to Oguri’s dark view of physicality and seemed more conventionally choreographic in form. And the performance remained unforgettable--making the deafening accompaniment needless. Anyone can turn up the volume to full--and, sooner or later at “Dance Without Borders,” nearly everyone did. But who else can move like this?

If Long Nguyen’s new “Still” solo on Saturday introduced extremes of balance that appeared nothing less than metaphysical ordeals, the solo suddenly abandoned this focus for diversionary runs across the stage with a billowing fabric held overhead. You could recognize glints of Anna Pavlova and some modern dance pioneers in this veil sequence, but Nguyen’s 1993 trio, “Common Love,” proved far more satisfying in its mastery of mood, structure and musicality.

Set to arrangements of British folk songs, “Common Love” suggested relationships in its duets and a whole landscape when Nguyen danced through a thicket of legs belonging to Jennifer Kim and Phyllis Gomer. But the highlight was surely a quicksilver duet for Nguyen and Gomer full of imaginative lifts and magical transitions in and out of unison.

Three group pieces by Frit and Frat Fuller for their KIN Dance Company ended the Saturday program in a blaze of pop-dance flamboyance. Products of both CalArts and Hollywood, the Fullers combine the accessibility and technical flair of commercial dance with thematic preoccupations of the avant-garde.

Previously reviewed, their 1992 all-male showpiece “Stomp” touches briefly on gays in the military but mostly depicts young America’s estrangement from gung-ho patriotism. Evolving from versions seen in the “Voices in Motion” series, “Pale Forest” portrays two kinds of urban desperation: among the homeless and among those with more money but who feel equally trapped on our streets.

Their new “Cell-Block ‘A’ ” again explores being trapped--and again shows men turning to one another in moments of deep need. The Fullers’ big, bold jazz style may come too close to “Jailhouse Rock” slickness, but they cleverly use contrasting movement languages to objectify racial and cultural differences--and then inventively fuse them in a statement of tolerance and growth.

Ending the Friday program, Rachel Rosenthal’s 1991 performance art vehicle “Filename: FUTUREFAX” doesn’t belong on a dance series. However, this evocation of a grim future allows Rosenthal to undercut her grandiose earth-mother or queen-bitch roles by portraying herself as a garrulous coot with a wicked tongue and a deranged amusement at the fatal follies of mankind.

Set on her 86th birthday, A.D. 2012 (with a flash-forward to even more frightening prospects in 2092), Rosenthal’s one-act solo does evolve into a lament for human arrogance, but most of the time the sorrow is personal--for her world, her life--and all the more effective for its intimacy.