‘Descent’ Skewers the Dark Side of Popular Culture

At a time of unprecedented media power and influence, Euro-American performing artists are taking a hard look at the sham, the con, the poison in popular entertainment. Exactly a month after the Pina Bausch company danced “Nelken” (Carnations) at UCLA, along comes Susan Marshall with “The Descent Beckons,” another satire of pop culture reflecting the same dismay over that culture’s lust for violence.

At the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Sunday, Marshall’s sardonic 53-minute compendium of the cliches of audience manipulation returned her to the raw physicality and anarchic energy conspicuously missing in her glazed 1996 collaboration with Philip Glass, “Les Enfants Terribles.”

Starting with Lisa Kron’s parody of a welcoming speech promising us, none too convincingly, that the performance would be beautiful--indeed, more than beautiful--this was “Nelken” American-style, with Marshall’s brisk, unassuming postmodernism shaping the result rather than the more brooding and political European dance theater espoused by Bausch.

On leave from the Five Lesbian Brothers theater company, Kron wrote the text for “The Descent Beckons” and also served as a kind of “That’s Entertainment!”-style docent, whether warbling “Unchained Melody” or solemnly telling us which of the lyrics to “The Way You Look Tonight” were profound and which unimportant.

Like Kron, the six dancers in Marshall’s company wore shiny, glittering, revealing costumes by Kasia Wilicka Maimone, perfect for the mock-celebratory and pseudo-narcissistic choreography. In many of these sequences, Kron and the dancers manipulated inflatable naked dummies--the female figures all blond and bosomy, the males all dark and hunky--using them as a mindlessly compliant and often abused super-corps.

Dancing to “Madeline,” for instance, the dancers added kicking the dummies to their repertoire of fancy footwork, sexy poses, lip-syncing and painted smiles. And later, as Marshall initiated a countdown to a new year, a new century, a new millennium, balloon-corpses began to strew the stage: casualties of the growing rage that had fueled an assaultive slam-dancing septet to “Tico Tico” and several other nasty encounters.

In one of these, his company colleagues imprisoned dancer Omar Rahim inside a portable hamper for the crime of daring to sing his version of “Unchained Melody,” inspiring Kron to pontificate at length, ever so sympathetically, on teenagers locked inside car trunks and other signs of societal sickness--without, of course, ever bothering to help him get out.

Elsewhere, a number of trios showed one dancer (usually a woman) aggressively pulled between two partners, treated nearly as roughly as the dummies in order to wow us out front. Sometimes the sound of thunder colored the violence, and premonitions of disaster also grew increasingly prominent in the score by David Lang of the Bang on a Can music group.

But Marshall offered no suggestion that the storm might pass, the disaster might be averted or that any potential for positive change exists and could prevail. None. The dancing in “The Descent Beckons” began with Eileen Thomas preening icily before the footlights in a silver evening gown: an icon of empty glamour. And after the evening’s end-of-year, end of-century, end-of-millennium countdown finished and Marshall showed a new day dawning for all of us, there Thomas stood, still preening.

You’d have to be one of Marshall’s smiling dummies to miss the point: Those yearning for miraculous millennial renewal should look someplace other than Broadway or Hollywood. Patterns of media exploitation are always fun to satirize, but they may well outlast us all.

Besides the performers previously named, the Marshall company included Mark de Chiazza, Kristen Hollinsworth, Marlon Barrios and Krista Langberg.