An Arty Homage to Dirty Harry: Go Ahead, Make My Day

Composer Philip Glass may create theater pieces inspired by the films of Jean Cocteau, but for locally based artists Melinda Ring and Tony Abatemarco, the right-wing justice fantasies of Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” movies offer an ideal opportunity to use dance and performance art techniques to examine some of our darkest societal obsessions.

In the hourlong “Slow Dissolve: Meditations on the Film ‘Sudden Impact’ ” at the Getty Center on Friday, they embodied and also satirized key issues within a 1983 action thriller considered the most morally ambiguous of Dirty Harry’s adventures--a film best known for the tag line “Go ahead, make my day,” but also intently focused on rape and its aftermath.

Filling Williams Auditorium with environmental sound effects and ominous music by Mark Wheaton (credited as “inspired by the Lalo Schifrin score”), Ring and Abatemarco often adapted film technology: performing in slow motion, fast motion or in repetitive loops of action and speech. In one solo, for instance, Abatemarco dodged a relentless, unending onslaught of bullets, as if every gunshot that Eastwood ever fired had been spliced together in one impossibly violent cadenza. Other sequences found Ring depicting the rape of Sondra Locke’s character, with her movement and the furniture on the stage arranged so that the audience seemed to be positioned underneath her--as voyeurs or accomplices.

Ring made such dance-based material horrifically graphic, but sounded flat and amateurish in dialogue episodes. Nor could Abatemarco really dance, though his acting skills served him splendidly in dry lampoons of Eastwood machismo and a passage of accelerating, out-of-phase talk and motion in which both he and Ring were dressed identically as Locke. An evening full of insight, humor and the risk of specialized performers stretching themselves with new challenges.