DANCE REVIEW : All’s Fair in ‘Orange County’

To contemporary choreographer Susan Rose, sequencing is destiny. She doesn’t invent movement but gathers whatever’s out there--folk dance, ballet, martial arts--then chops her sources into repeatable motifs and assembles them in intricate constructions marked by a powerful sense of drive but scarcely any hint of dynamic variety.

Chairwoman of the dance department at UC Riverside, Rose explains her pieces in program notes full of academic dance jargon, but their ideas ultimately matter less than their structural rhythms. Indeed, at Occidental College on Friday, the explanations often seemed to be afterthoughts: clever exercises in heightening the expressive content of works more interesting for their divisions of energy.

In the satiric “Orange County” (1990), Rose and Kelli King gathered up, hoarded and manipulated 32 oranges (or colored tennis balls used as surrogates)--playing Southern California moguls depleting the landscape to gain power and wealth.

The longer, more complex quintet “Detour” (1995) touched on parallel environmental issues through the arrangement of orange traffic cones. Unfortunately, Rose’s use of objects to define movement tasks and spatial limits lacked the conceptual sharpness and physical intensity of such previously reviewed works as Joel Christensen’s solo “Tired.”

Both “Bending Around the Words” (1994) and “A Prior Arrangement” (1993) evolved into trios and focused on processes of accommodating the newcomer. The former featured deliberately garish costumes and a playoff between ballet and karate. The latter boasted the strongest dancing on the program--by King and two guests from the Lewitzky company, Roger Gonzalez Hibner and Diana MacNeil.