A Moving Story, Sans Movement

When dancers won’t dance, it’s news.

Mehmet “Memo” Sander is best known for creating severely formal, hyperphysical pieces based in gymnastics--pieces that can be interpreted as metaphors for survival because they subject the performers to extreme tests of stamina as well as confrontations with objects and threatening spatial environments.

The Turkish choreographer (a resident of Long Beach) recently set one such piece on the Joffrey Ballet and plans to make a new one for that company next spring. But on Thursday he spent an evening at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica not dancing. Instead, he showed slides of his family and his lover, Harold (lost to AIDS not long ago), talked about the evolution of his own consciousness as a gay man and dance artist and shaped his anger at the injustices of the AIDS crisis into startling performance vignettes about sex and pain.

The only dancing in “Memo Unplugged” came on videotape: a performance of his nude 1990 solo “18,” in which he repeatedly slammed his body on the floor, trying to accommodate it to the contours of a large taped cross. (Sander took his title from the chapter in Leviticus condemning nakedness and homosexuality.)

“Pick your war and fight it,” the HIV-positive Sander told the audience at one point. “My war is gay rights and AIDS.” He then enlisted “gun guru” Dave Woods in arming himself for that war, producing firearms that he named for various anti-gay American politicians. But the only one actually used was on himself: in a representation of anal sex shocking enough to cause several audience members to leave.

Depicting sex with a loaded revolver obviously tested the limits of performance, but it also fused the themes of desire and death that Sander had introduced earlier in an image both disturbing and indelible. “Memo Unplugged” may have been no substitute for a program of Mehmet Sander choreography, but in its rambling, anecdotal way it proved just as unsparing--especially the reenactment of Harold’s death.

Moreover, its humor was something new in a Sander performance, sometimes gallows humor, certainly, but elsewhere endearing vignettes about his life and times. Early on, for instance, he recalled spending all his lunch money at age 14 in Istanbul on David Bowie albums (forbidden by law) and Gummi Bears.

At the end, Sander sang “I Will Survive” in Turkish, adding a long auburn wig to his leatherman outfit in a final example of the surprising links between extremes that made the event so, well, Memo-rable.