Feet Speak the Subjective Truths

Women’s creativity has always been the touchstone of modern dance. Plugging into that tradition gave the “Women at Work” program on Saturday in the Keck Theater at Occidental College a plausible curatorial mission.

Here were five adventuresome, locally based artists who brought to this second event in the ongoing Feet Speak series a deep sense of self-definition: dance as a journey toward personal truths.

Indeed, Melinda Ring’s comic theater piece “Leaving Dora Jarr” seemed to insist that all truth is subjective: Liz Young earnestly listed the names of everyone in the audience (always deliberately getting them wrong) as Ring and Knansie Sandercock tumbled out of two doorways in slow motion, fast motion and every speed in between.

If Ring played with time, Karen Goodman’s spare, formalist solo “Crossing” emphasized distance, showing how the process of moving ever forward into unknown terrain involves the heroic conquest of fear. Vanquishing that fear: a reaching hand with a will of its own, a questing drive that carried the whole body onward.

Heroism of a similar sort shaped Rosanna Gamson’s intense “Bluebeard Solo,” a meditation on violence danced in a circle of candles and accompanied by the artful singing of Barbara Kelley. Confronting a world of cruelty with the softness of her gestures, Gamson emerged as both a survivor and a model of resistance to evil.

Dulce Capadocia’s nostalgic “Song for Tatay (Father)” began with quasi-documentary images of a Philippine family: aged parent, caring child. Soon, however, the choreographer and Muni Zano reached back in time for recollections of how that parent helped his daughter to free her spirit.

Her solo “Mirror, Mirror” gave Winifred R. Harris a new opportunity to portray an imposing, statuesque female archetype--this one wearing an ornate white gown and red veil and stalking the stage like an ancient prophet, pointing her finger ominously toward future disasters that only she could see.

Harris’ grimly satiric duet “Art and / or Commerce” found Kendra McCool and Carla Anderson alternating between snooty balletic formality and more proletarian images (bathing-beauty poses, gymnastic lifts), periodically reaching up and out, fingers wiggling, toward a rain of dollar bills hitting the stage.

Money falling from the skies onto the notoriously underfunded Feet Speak series? Definitely a fantasy if not an extreme delusion.

* Feet Speak continues with “Men of Distinction” at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday in the Keck Theater, Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road, Eagle Rock. $5-$15. (213) 259-2922.