French Festival Hopefuls Compete in DanceWest

In creating and continually enlarging an international festival of contemporary choreography, the city of Bagnolet just outside Paris has become an evolutionary force with an ever-widening impact. Eighteen countries currently participate in the festival selection process--some with only token representation--luring choreographers with the prospect of major artistic recognition, prizes of $20,000 plus travel expenses to the biannual event.

During the weekend, West Coast companies competed for festival entry for the first time, with two programs in the Luckman Complex at Cal State L.A. showcasing eight applicants out of an initial field of 36. Judges at the performances will make their final choices in March: a total of 15 international winners to present their works during the sixth Rencontres Choreographiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis from May 12 to 17.

Titled DanceWest, the two Luckman programs were mounted by the local foundation that stages the annual scattershot Dance Kaleidoscope festival but strongly reflected the much more focused priorities of the Rencontres judges. Indeed, a casual observer might conclude from the Friday and Saturday performances that most West Coast choreographers share a taste for eccentric and arbitrary discontinuities, black-and-white design schemes, onstage costume changes and collage scores dominated by the sound of rushing wind.

That observer also might have found other intriguing family resemblances--the tendency of the two Bay Area companies, for example, to choose daunting themes and make dance distinctly secondary to other means of expression. In “Night,” Nancy Karp took on Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi rampage against Jewish-owned property in Germany, but provided little beyond a neatly crafted public display of sensitivity. The real heat of the performance came from the score: Alvin Curran’s “Crystal Psalms” (fragments of recorded music fusing in a horrific lament), plus the furious smashing and bashing by percussionist Joel Davel. At one point, Karp’s six-member cast looked around helplessly as loudspeakers amplified the sweeping up of broken glass: dancers as numb, passive witnesses to an experience evoked for the audience through sound.

Similarly, Bay Area choreographer Joe Goode used dance to illustrate “The Maverick Strain” but told his tale of AIDS burnout primarily through speech. Casting himself in the role of relentlessly ironic Truth-Teller, he hectored Lizz Burritt for cowardice in scenes defining the distinctive concept and style of the piece while every so often dancers appeared in the background to perform cuddly, sentimental statements of farewell to music by Beth Custer.

The two Seattle-based companies each looked ruefully at women’s sense of displacement, not so much creating new choreography as collecting familiar motifs from popular culture and arranging them in revealing behavioral parodies. In “Sleep (Making Peace With the Angels),” the Pat Graney Company staged a dreamlike goodbye to girlhood, with an anything-but-joyous wedding looming ever larger in consciousness. Unfortunately, several false endings and a weak real one dimmed the luster of the piece’s deepest images.

For their 33 Fainting Spells company, Dayna Hanson and Gaelen Hanson cleverly stitched together cliches from show business, the office and singles bars in the whimsical trio “Maria the Storm Cloud,” detailing the heroic task of sustaining individuality in a world with a pigeonhole waiting for everyone.

All the Seattle and Bay Area works had been excerpted, condensed or adapted from full-evening creations, and several of them seemed disjointed or incomplete at the Luckman. In contrast, the four Southern California entries were presented unabridged. In “Windscape,” butoh artist Oguri collaborated with composer Shane Cadman on a work that used two dancers to amplify and externalize the storm ranging within Oguri’s own body downstage--a storm distorting his limbs and torso into impossibly grotesque alignments.

Hae Kyung Lee’s “Confrontation” enlisted music by Steve Moshier in statements of apocalyptic violence expanding from combative sex-war duets to forceful repetitive ensembles. John Malashock’s “Force Fields” also focused on combat, punctuating stylized wrestling for the gladiatorial ensemble with a series of more realistic sword and knife battles for Malashock and James Newcomb.

Jacques Heim’s previously reviewed group gymnastic showpiece “Quatre” for Diavolo Dance Theatre completed the programs.