Cultural Hints Influence Harris Program

Winifred R. Harris’ choreography, at its best, suggests sources. We seem to be looking at and through cultural imagery from Africa, from Mesopotamia, from India, wherever, to something that inspired it and was faultily or only partially captured in it.

Some splendid examples--”Shhh!” and “Thunder Is Not Yet Rain”--were on view Friday in a seven-part program by Harris’ Between Lines company at the State Playhouse at Cal State L.A.

In these works, Harris presents powerful women in fluid, timeless, iconographic activity. The choreography is formal, canonic, often mirrored and just asymmetrical enough to keep the predictable away.

When the concept or the magic doesn’t quite jell, as was the case of “If I Stopped, Would You Notice?” in its premiere Friday, we see clear shapes, patterns, activity, even some signature Harris movement motifs. But they remain on the surface and don’t lead to anything.

So Tiza Wynn’s outsider anguish toward the end of the piece seems an overlay unprepared for and unjustified. Perhaps it is meant to be a fruitless protest against the common gestural vocabulary of the other dancers (Adrian Young, Cari Riis, Kendra McCool and Carla Anderson)--fruitless because it subsides into their gestures. But it just doesn’t work. The industrial music score was by Steven Mosier.

Other dancers in the course of the evening in mostly previously reviewed works included Harris, Myshia Moten, Kim Clark and Kathleen Kaufman.

Another section of what appears to be a developing work, “One Race Woman,” was presented. This was “Interrogation,” a theater-based piece protesting violence against women. However deeply felt, the immoderate spoken texts asserting in effect, for instance, that all men are guilty until proved innocence make this a piece for advocates only.