Deft Wit Energizes Collaborative UCLA Program

With high intelligence and deadpan humor, the veteran California-based dance-makers who collaborated on “4 Choreographers / Southern Exposure” in Kaufman Hall at UCLA on Friday used much of their seven-part program to perform dances that doubled as lessons.

Sitting at a piano throughout her solo “Dancing Music,” for instance, Susan Rose embodied the prime postmodern tenet that any kind of motion can be construed as dance--including wildly banging on the keyboard or soundlessly pantomiming virtuosity, or mashing her forearms on the keys or just bouncing on the seat.

Expanding on the same theme, Victoria Marks’ women’s quartet “Dancing to Music” used head-turns (up, down and to the side) as the main vocabulary for a surprisingly varied study of movement rhythm, with glints of emotion and budding relationships softening the pervading formalism.

In “Creation,” Marks kept repeating another formal movement cycle while Dan Froot and Ross Levinson described her actions like sportscasters. Written by Marks and Dan Hurlin, these descriptions started as detailed documentation--”you cross your arms, you inhale, you exhale”--but soon expanded into outrageous fantasies, as if Marks were at one point a lap dancer on the make and at another a wild beast on the prowl.

Obviously, the text parodied the bizarre values that audiences project onto dancing, but somehow the examples didn’t include the kind of academic, sociopolitical dance-jargon found on every bulletin board of Kaufman Hall--and also in the Susan Foster texts punctuating the duet “Delivering the Paper” on the same program.

Choreographed and danced by Rose and Wendy Rogers, this deft, whimsical showpiece involved creative strategies for scattering sheets of paper across the stage--sometimes by floating them on top of an arm or leg beginning to rise up into the air, sometimes by just dropping them to the ominous accompaniment of music by Verdi.

The lessons in Rose’s rock quintet “Breakup” came from the array of imaginative supported extensions--but also, alas, from a sense of diminishing returns caused by working her dancers so hard that numbing exhaustion set in. Many of the same young artists looked infinitely more comfortable in “2 Trees From Brazil,” Rogers’ intuitive, mercurial playoff between individual and group energies.

In Jean Isaacs’ thoughtful, turbulent “American Beauty,” the isolation and interaction of four glamorous women and four hunky men raised intriguing questions about our society’s ever-shifting stereotypes of desirability: who’s the seeker, who’s the sought-after and the insecurity accompanying both roles.