DANCE REVIEWS : TerpsiCorps Fails to Gain Foothold With LATC Work

TerpsiCorps, a jazz and ballet-based dance company trying to get a foothold in the L.A. scene, found the going more than slippery in the first of two performances at the Los Angeles Theatre Center over the weekend.

Founded in 1992, the company was named for Terpsichore, muse of dance and choral music. At this point, it is safe to guess that the muse is not amused by this association, so uninspired was the choreographic spirit evident in several recent works by artistic director Loren Denker.

Set on a company of eight women, Denker’s movements in all her pieces were relentlessly decorative and often vacuously presentational. The impression left is that dancers go from pose to pose, repeat simple combinations of occasionally jazzy ballet moves on one side then another, follow the beats of the music like slaves, then whirl to face us again, arms outstretched in a way reminiscent of nightclub floor shows.

With this formula, each dance was predictable, but some were worse than others: “Off Beat” had bland, robotic shifts and weakly menacing stares, and in “Bailes Espanoles,” a series of prettified swirls and skirt twirling were skimmed off the surface of flamenco.

In “Submerged,” various subsections named for seafood featured an excess of watery waving of arms and crab-like crawling. Occasionally, a dancer such as Yan Lin, with a beautiful line and delicately lyrical arms, caught focus, but she had little to work with.

Unlike the dancing, with its Musak-like blandness, the music for several pieces--both live and on tape by saxophonist Lincoln Adler--provided well-grounded and exciting gestures. During a pause between dances, Adler played a small solo before the curtain, his slightly shifting, narrow stance, quirky foot taps and punctuating mid-torso contractions offering up a miracle of integrated movement invention missing in the rest of the dancing.