WEEKEND REVIEWS : DANCE : ‘Prime Moves’ Is a Prime Time at LACE

Seems like old times: Local artists and spectators jammed in a sweltering black box, fighting to present and experience new work despite impossible sight-lines and other conditions likely to send the uncommitted fleeing back to their chandeliered, air-conditioned culture palaces.

Welcome to “Prime Moves” 1995: a contemporary dance series born and nurtured in college theaters but honing its sense of mission Friday in the back room of the new Hollywood Boulevard home of LACE. Curated by Suzanne Jett, the series’ fifth edition focused on female power and resilience, always the bottom line of modern dance and often its greatest glory.

On Friday, the audience had to dodge and sometimes stand to glimpse crucial floor work in half the pieces--but no matter. As the room heated up to sauna temperatures, the ovations grew hotter as well. Everyone who stayed had sweat equity in “Prime Moves” and the incentives to stay proved compelling.

For starters, Winifred R. Harris contributed two new works, including the hit of the evening: an untitled duet from “Bitter Sweets” (music by Max Roach) in which Miko Doi-Smith and Catherine Ybarra cradled and supported one another in increasingly daring and exultant tests of balance and strength.

As usual, Harris’ choreography put a premium on polished execution, with her performance of the solo “Void of Essence” (music by Tori Amos) especially artful in this regard. As her arms and legs swirled in expanding spirals, creating a vortex of motion extending way, way beyond the tiny performing area, Harris made womanhood a conduit for natural forces--forces that appeared to frighten her but which she could not resist.

In “When Strength Is My Weakness” (music by Wayne Wallace), Bay Area dancer/choreographer Laura Elaine Ellis matched Harris’ dynamism but not her technical sophistication as a performer nor her sense of creative focus. Overloaded with promise not ennobled by suffering, but a living testament to what caused it.

Danced by Siri Sat Nam, Pat Taylor and Jeremy Tatum, the excerpt from Taylor’s “Odysseus Suite” (music by Mark Shelby) contained both a stale jazz adagio documenting the breakdown of a relationship and several simple, heartfelt and convincing statements about family bonding. Inconclusive, but tantalizing . . .

Boldly theatrical in its timing and buildup of motifs, Laurence Blake’s “1800 PSI” solo failed only when trying to match the force of its accompaniment (music by Scorn). Indeed, its most imaginative moments came when Blake’s dancing softened and grew magically still as the music became thunderous: a lighthouse in a storm, perhaps, or Hamlet on the battlements.

So much of Lisa Lock’s “Canopy” (music by Leigh Ann Gillespie) involved crawling and other floor-based motion that it could be glimpsed only in fragments: a long leg, with pointed toe momentarily extending above the heads of the audience, for example. It will be reviewed later in the weekend series, conditions permitting.