DANCE REVIEWS : Christensen Troupe Enters ‘Machine’ Age at LATC

There was no music in four of the five short works called “Machine” by Christensen Dance Company on Thursday night at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Replacing it was a steady sound scape of dancers’ breathing--panting, grunts of exhaustion and pronounced exhalations.

Fatigue-as-accompaniment made sense in Joel Christensen’s earlier pieces on the program--the task-oriented “Blocks,” and his solos “Boing” or “Tired,” in which he frolics among tires he constantly rearranges. But in two new low-impact pieces, the often evenly paced and light physical efforts of the dancers (Christensen, Caroline Aizawa, Maryann Thomson and William Schurmann) didn’t seem to warrant that amount of audible exhaustion.

The mood of “Kinetics,” for instance, was more that of a warm-up, with dancers in pale spandex unitards tracing their own phrases, swiveling arms and hips as if to limber up. Keeping a casual rhythmic connection to four or five metronomes around the stage, they fell into partial unison and stopped in erect poses with angled arms and tilted flat palms.

Poses recurred with more regularity in “100” when a similar kind of noodling was alternated with a series (or fragments) of 100 classroom-like poses, called out by each dancer as performed.

It was hard to decipher a mood in these two works, which are definitely not in the hyperdance realm. The loose, detached, almost mechanical style and evenly spaced groupings were reminiscent of Merce Cunningham, without his attention to formal detail or the technical precision of his dancers. Christensen’s combinations of everyday movement and jazzy or balletic modern dance aligns him with any number of postmodern dance-makers,

Technical glitches and an under-rehearsed look to group pieces didn’t help, but Christensen’s larger assignment is to give his company something more to breathe hard about.

* “Machine,” performed by the Christensen Dance Co., Lo Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., downtown, tonight, 8 p.m., $8. (213) 485-1631.