‘IF’ Showcases Female Power, Agility in Works at LACE

While many dance aficionados were downtown watching the Joffrey Ballet on Thursday night, a perhaps harder core audience was cheering a group of contemporary dancers and choreographers as they flexed their mostly female muscles at LACE in Hollywood.

“IF,” an evening of eight premieres and one previously seen work, generated much creative heat, beginning with Phyllis Douglass’ Bridge Dance Theatre. “Fences,” a riveting work in progress that chronicles urban angst, saw a quartet of powerful dancers--choreographer Douglass, Maia Heiss, Reba Mehan and Robin Ziemer--executing martial arts-like moves with diving push-ups, captured live by Clyde Howell on video shot through fencing material.

Food ruled in Lisa Townsend’s effective “Apple of Discord,” where Townsend spasmodically attempted to reach the hanging biblical fruit, and in her “Neither Blue Most Both,” a duet with Tomas Tamayo in which the couple displayed amazing balancing feats with eggs. Eggs proved less successful in Liz Maxwell’s “Walking on Walls,” where Tamayo, Gina Dominguez, Alena Cawthorne and Jesse Carlota Kile veered from circus moves to “musical stools” while enacting Dr. Seuss’ Horton hatching his mythic egg. Maxwell’s “Torn” was also unfocused: Torn paper squares provided scenery and sound, as a quartet of dancers slid, tossed and meditated upon them.

Ziemer, muscularly statuesque, performed her awesome solo, “Snake River Angel,” with yoga postures predominating. Monica Favand’s “Wasteland,” a bleak tableau of isolation, featured strong performances by Roger Fojas, Eun Jong Kim and Jim Rizza. Townsend’s “TurnAround,” the program’s coda, found various dancers casually aping one another’s moves; it was cute but not much more.

* “IF” repeats tonight at 8 at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., $12. (213) 957-1777.