HEAD Amid Marks’ Uncertainty, Some Answers Emerge

From clues in her choreography, Victoria Marks often seems puzzled about why people should dance. In “My First Solo,” a spoken monologue, she actually says that dance “isn’t doing it” for her anymore. And elsewhere, her dancers frequently look reluctant to take the next step. They launch into short movement phrases, only to pause and stare out, or at each other.

In a theater, this endless thoughtfulness and delay can seem self-indulgent--a little too much static questioning. But in California Plaza on Sunday night, with its fresh breeze and city noises, the rest of the world intruded and almost answered back--”go ahead, take a step, the world’s still revolving.”

This was especially the case with “Present,” a 1995 solo Marks made with Nami Yamamoto, who dances it. After bringing onstage a wrapped present, she tries to offer a gift of dance, but can’t get going, ending small phrases with an empty flourish or a wan stare, as if it’s fruitless. Or else she is savoring each moment, trying to remain in the present by following her own thoughts. Either way, her exercise was enhanced by the surrounding reflecting pools, which she leaped over, or dipped into a few times.

In Marks’ 1996 duet “Back,” Yamamoto and Amanda Loulaki negotiate a relationship that is also full of pauses and patterns. They move like floppy dolls who can only use torsos and heads to nudge and butt each other with sudden impulses animated by fading batteries. They repeat kinetic patterns with all the dazed urgency of a child looking for comfort by rocking herself to sleep.

In two newer works, Marks’ use of non-dancers brought new life to her interrogatory style. In “Father/Daughter Dance” (1998), Dawn Akemi Saito and her father, Gyoko Saito (a Buddhist bishop), eye each other calmly or warily, coming together for a dance that seems both familiar and strange to them. Most of us aren’t used to dancing out relationships, and the Saitos were riveting, full of an everyday gracefulness of spirit.

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This was also the mood of “Men” (1997), Marks’ latest collaboration with filmmaker Margaret Williams. Set in the glens of the Canadian Rockies, the film is made of whimsical scenes featuring seven older men who good-naturedly take on Marks’ enigmatic gestures and are elegantly framed throughout, all to an evocative cello score by Andy Teirstein. If they are puzzled by their directions--touch this guy’s face, conduct those mountains like a choir--it doesn’t show. They’ve probably learned by now that life is already a strange dance.