DANCE REVIEW : Haden-Rogers Create Haunting ‘Love?’

As collaborators, choreographer Raiford Rogers and jazzman Charlie Haden were made for each other. In the past, using every kind of music from country to opera, Rogers has fashioned a series of atmospheric dream dances for Los Angeles Chamber Ballet, the company he co-founded in 1981. Other works, such as “Orpheus,” expressed Rogers’ sensitivity to the fusion of myth and reality in the Southern California landscape.

Enter the Charlie Haden Quartet West with its Grammy-nominated album “Always Say Goodbye.” With its layering of antique movie soundtracks (including speech), vintage songs and new jazz performances, this innovative recording offered Rogers a ready-made Hollywood dream full of glamour, irony, lyricism and suggestions of menace.

On Sunday, Haden’s album and Rogers’ thematic preoccupations came together in a haunting jazz-ballet titled “Where Are You My Love?,” the centerpiece in an otherwise conventional program by Quartet West and Chamber Ballet at Cal State Los Angeles. In a long opening set, the musicians held the stage alone, showcasing their artistry in pieces providing extensive solos for Haden on bass, Ernie Watts on tenor saxophone, Alan Broadbent on piano and Larance Marable on drums.

The end of the program brought the musicians and 10 dancers together for “Merge,” in which Rogers used familiar classical steps and partnering relationships with plenty of fluency but no special distinction. Except, perhaps, for the curious decision to keep the women in soft slippers instead of pointe shoes, this could have been anybody’s jazz-ballet.

But “Where Are You My Love?” fused jazz and pop, movie lore and classical dancing with great originality. In particular, the combination of cliches drawn from ballet and film history yielded witty new images: a line of women entering like the fabled shades in “La Bayadere,” for instance, only to assume a series of bathing-beauty poses as if they were Goldwyn Girls from beyond the grave. Or David Cesler’s slo-mo pas de deux with a huge blue balloon--played with the high-Romantic yearning of the last act of “Giselle.”

Early on, a plot line of sorts emerged that ensnared Carol Guidry in hopeless Expressionist doom, a feeling that owed as much to Liz Stillwell’s simultaneously glaring and gloomy lighting as the music (on tape), choreography or dancing. Another victory of imagination for the city’s oldest and most genuinely creative ballet ensemble.