Dance : A Strong, Alert Outing From Lewitzky Troupe at Cal State

In its first engagement since the startling news of its future demise, the Lewitzky Dance Company projected no sense of demoralization. If anything, the troupe looked especially strong and alert over the weekend in the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State Los Angeles.

On Saturday, the dancers captured three distinct moods and preoccupations of founder Bella Lewitzky, who announced last Monday that she will disband the company by June, 1997, following a two-year commemoration of her work. Maybe the official assessments and re-evaluations are supposed to begin during that commemorative season, but already mixed feelings of joy and loss seem inevitable.

Joy for the vigorous imagination evident in works spanning decades, and loss over the fate of such a finely honed repertory and company.

“8 Dancers/8 Lights” brought whimsy and game structures to forging a joyous community. “Five,” in contrast, focused on individual isolation and paranoia. “Spaces Between” used abstract and formal movement patterns to explore and reconsider space and dimension, and packed a surprise in the closing images.

Created in 1985, the episodic “8 Dancers” (to Caribbean-flavored music by Donald Knaack) presents follow-the-leader tasks in a playground of quirky-minded fluorescent tubes. Magically, this all culminates in a linked chain of dancers, an image of human solidarity. The cast consisted of Roger Gonzalez Hibner, Walter Kennedy, Diana MacNeil, Lori McWilliams, John Pennington, Ken Talley, Diana Vivona and Yolande Yorke Edgell.

Just over a decade earlier, Lewitzky created “Five,” which is far less optimistic in portraying the human situation.

Five dancers--MacNeil, McWilliams, Pennington, Li Chun Chang and Talley--are revealed one by one behind floor-to-ceiling fabric strips (decor and lighting by Darlene Neel). They define their identities and their isolation through compact, angular movements, and slowly, to Max Lifchitz’s distraught, tense score, emerge to explore space outside their safety zones.

Contact with one another is wary and tentative, more like a wound than a pleasure. But the fabric strips rise, contact becomes support, and the return to their warmly lit home bases may show some hope.

With Newell Taylor Reynolds’ minimal but evocative plexiglass designs, the severely disciplined “Spaces Between” (also created in 1974) contrasted the flat transparency of film with sculptural masses. The contrasts take place first on the horizontal plane, then, with the aid of a floating platform, on the vertical.

Thanks again to Neel’s dramatic lighting design, the work ended in an explosion of images as dancers and their shadows were seen in varying sizes on overlapping planes. The piece was danced strongly by Chang, Hibner, Kennedy, McWilliams, Talley, Vivona, Karen Woo and Edgell.