MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : ‘Spirit Thunder’ Explores Ritual Ground

Working with the notion that we are all one is always a tricky business, especially since--on most days--we are all so clearly not one.

But it’s hard to knock wanting to find “the place of deep spirit that rumbles in each of us,” the goal of five choreographers who made short works for “Spirit Thunder,” at L.A. Venue in Hollywood Friday.

Conceived by Dulce Capadocia (director of Silayan) and Michelle Broussard (director of Wild Abandon), the program clearly located spiritual searches in a land of careful movement, solidly aware gazes and drifty, curving arms.

Taped music ranged from bells and chants to electronic rhythms that recall wind, surf and animal cries. Bathed in ivory light, the tiny studio space became ground for finding relationships between ceremony and theatrical dance. Dancers seemed to breathe rarefied air and each work was offered as a kind of gift.

Useful in creating a healing mood, most pieces were more like studies, taking one movement idea and developing it only a little. In “The Way You See, the Way I Am,” Benitha Blakely mournfully caressed her face while bending back from a kneeling position. And Broussard’s “Tides of Knowing” is a trio of women whose scurrying, gentle tracing of circles and wary, darting glances seemed significant and slight at the same time.

Capadocia’s “Diwata, Fly” was more ambitious, with three men as divine spirits swirling, stamping and waving eagle-like arms. In Rose Lago’s solo, “I Give, to You,” was the fascinating beginnings of a dance with movement derived from everyday tasks and warlike rituals.

But here as elsewhere, the adoption of a worshipful gravity as aesthetic has its limits. One of the problems of creating new myths with old protocols is that you may end up glancing too far back to keep moving forward.