Net Dancing: ‘E-Mail’ Is Postage-Due

Although surfing the Net and e-mail may be technology’s latest trends, these preoccupations don’t translate well into dance, at least judging by the evidence of Louise Reichlin’s “The E-Mail Dances: version 1.0 alpha” on Wednesday night at USC’s Bovard Auditorium. In this labored multimedia premiere, Reichlin, choreographer and director of Los Angeles Choreographers and Dancers, presented a suite of five works in which, unfortunately, there was too little dance and too much e-mail.

At the beginning of the first three “E-Mail Dances,” Michael Masucci’s video played while Reichlin delivered accounts of looking for Polish relatives via modem. A nod to the Holocaust, “Yellow Star” featured a lively septet of dancers doing variations on the hora as they waved yellow streamers, which, through video magic, turned into a large Jewish star. “Re-Relative?” proved dull as Reichlin recited e-mail between her and a cousin, while “Woman in a Room, Woman in the Moon” featured some nifty imagery of company member Tamara Dowling writhing on screen.

The evening’s most inspired choreography and dancing, “Contest,” had Allison Higa and Ken Arata performing leaps, spins, squats and cartwheels in a frenetic pas de deux mating dance. The final segment, “Remembrance,” presented a gauze-clad Morgan Williams gracefully moving about the stage with a peculiar helmet/inverted mushroom headdress. Although the dance concerned what to do with Reichlin’s father’s ashes, the dancer looked so weird as to provoke titters from the audience.

Filling out the program were Reichlin’s 1984 “Celtic Suite,” in which Alfred Desio executed some buoyant tap-dancing; excerpts from Reichlin’s 1979 opus, “The Tennis Dances”; and her 1995 suite, “Dances of Assimilation,” in which bad lighting did little to enhance repetitive slouching movements, a scattershot of outstretched arms and swooping kicks.

Reichlin may be moving into the 21st century electronically, but dance-wise, she remains stuck in the past.