La Danserie’s Novel Pieces Fade Too Soon at Highways

Most of the pieces by the locally based collective La Danserie end just as they’re getting interesting. With splashy generative concepts and basic theatrical ploys on the table, there’s a need for imaginative development--not the fast fade-outs on view Thursday at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.

In Vanessa Jue’s trio “Fake Heels,” women in pointe shoes and lingerie dance sinewy laments, eventually going barefoot and topless as an act of liberation. But what then? Will they kill their boyfriends, as in Lisa K. Lock’s large-scale insect fantasy, “Shedding”? Or will they merely slump into chairs and wait for gravity to take its toll, as in Lock’s postmodern theater piece “I’ve Heard It All Before”? No way to tell because we don’t know who these characters are.

Lock needs lots more time to develop both the sexual metaphor in “Shedding” and her promising use of long plastic sheets as cocoons. But her pieces do have a distinctive shape and purpose, just as her dancing dominates the program with its intensity and mastery of detail. In Sayhber Rawles’ clever etude “R.E.M.,” she endows the jazz-based tossing and turning sequences with a special urgency and in Jennifer McDonald Wilson’s intriguing “Variegated,” she plays the outsider with great conviction.

On one level, “Variegated” functions as dance criticism: a put-down of old-fashioned music visualization, with five dancers efficiently executing formula unison choreography to the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and only Lock noticing that modern life is infinitely more complex and threatening than what they’re supposed to dance. Unfortunately for McDonald Wilson’s thesis, the program ends with a very artful example of old-fashioned music visualization: Patrick Frantz’s “Pointillism,” set to a Martinu cello sonata with great sensitivity--and equally astute about the capabilities of the six-woman cast. Using diagonal paths to get more dancing onto the small Highways stage, Frantz builds tension inventively and then releases it in sunbursts of group motion--a fine achievement in every way.

* La Danserie performs tonight at 8:30 in Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. $15. (310) 315-1459.