Supriyanto’s Still Engineering His Bridge

Eko Supriyanto’s career began in antique central Javanese court dance and now embraces the international avant garde as well as academia. Examples from these different dance worlds gave variety to his six-part “Continental Shift” program on Friday at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. However, the distinctive arm rotations and floating torso of Javanese classicism unified the evening, as did his slow, meditative, unyieldingly tense style of choreography.

Physical ease and spontaneity occurred only in Carol McDowell’s “Solo for Eko,” in which Supriyanto told two intersecting stories (one about himself, one about his parents), embellishing them with fluid dance gesture.

Otherwise, he continually locked himself down, whether in the measured body-lashings, coilings and sculptural stances of the improvisational solo “Sensing” or the confrontational gambits of the sex-war duet “Inconclusive Blooming” opposite Erica Rebollar. No notable dramatic insights here, but considerable freshness achieved through continual risings, fallings and other vertical emphases.

“Nya-Hi” (Dancing With the Goddess”) fitfully toyed with modern dance expression but extensively relied on Javanese traditions for its subject and stagecraft (the use of wicker horse effigies, for instance).

Unfortunately, this extended formal challenge duet for Alice Daley and Erin Schon succumbed to all the traps of cross-cultural fusion, promoting a pretentious agenda--including an impenetrable narrative--through relentlessly decorative movement.

*

Supriyanto proved more satisfying at the extremes of his range: dancing Wahyu Santoso Prabowo’s stately Javanese masked solo “Topeng Gunung Sari Dance” or choreographing “Year Book,” a contemporary duet in which Cindy Chung and Rainy Demerson angered and stifled one another in pithy speech and motion.

Right now, Supriyanto is equally authoritative in idioms of the East and West; he just can’t bridge them yet.