A Culture of Body Worship

In-your-face depictions of erotic excess delivered with deliberately contemptuous technical surety have been Donald Byrd’s choreographic specialty ever since he began presenting work in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. But, for all its bracing shock appeal, the most recent example on view Tuesday at the Watercourt in California Plaza exposed the creative limitations of his vision more than it illuminated its ostensible subjects: societal attitudes toward the body, sexuality in dance and the commercialization of desire.

The two-part Grand Performances program began with an earlier, more successful essay on American sexuality: Byrd’s sardonic, omnisexual “Quintet,” an excerpt from his 8-year-old “Drastic Cuts” to music by Mio Morales.

Although compulsive, mindless cruising formed its primary focus, the presence of a passive outsider added voyeurism to the mix. Initially Devin Pullins played the onlooker, but eventually his role was passed around, with virtually everyone, male and female, taking turns competing for the favors of Thaddeus Davis as well as deflecting the come-ons of the others.

Soon, however, as the dancing expanded from slithery body clusters and only slightly stylized groping maneuvers to a collage of ballet steps, gymnastic partnering feats and pop dance influences, the sex targets grew more inclusive. When, for example, Alexandra Damiani temporarily left the stage, Davis, Pullins and Jamal Story all peeled off their shirts and tried to out-dance and out-flex one another to attract the sole remaining female, Olivia Bowman. But their contest remained devoid of hostility--for these men had already played around with one another quite contentedly (and would again). So they ended up sharing Bowman--and Damiani too when she returned. As Joe Lieberman said, is this a great country or what?

Byrd’s game in “Quintet” involved keeping the dancing looking at once intricately organized yet also a plausible expression of the capricious participants. And he succeeded brilliantly--too brilliantly for his new full-company extravaganza “The Shack” to pass muster for anything other than its provocative costume effects.

Essentially an expansion of the mock-Fosse show-dance sequences in Byrd’s “Harlem Nutcracker” (1996), this excerpt from his three-act “A Different Light: Duke Ellington” featured endless pseudo-lascivious “Big Spender”-style lineups in which hard-sell sex-dance came packaged in increasingly outrageous costumes by Nancy Brous.

Satin ribbons dangled between the men’s legs in one sequence: good for energetic lashing, twirling and stroking gambits as well as fleeting baseball, microphone and rock-guitar metaphors. But nothing in Brous’ arsenal of over-the-top attire outclassed the sculptural appendages that gave all eight men and women in the cast enormous breasts and phalluses to wiggle and wag.

Fun while it lasted, and a pithy reminder of the obsession with body parts in this culture, “The Shack” ultimately betrayed its best ideas by staying at one level of parodistic overkill, never developing its collection of cliches beyond the obvious, beyond backdated Broadway stereotypes or beyond the achievements of Byrd’s choreographic predecessors.

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In “Spitfire” (1988), for instance, Matthew Bourne parodied the manipulation of sexual desire for purposes of commercial advertising. In “Striptease” (1986), Mark Morris dissected prototypic sex fantasies, separating the tantalizing illusions from the people who embody them. And in “Quintet” (1968), Alvin Ailey depicted the human cost to those forced to be forever hot and glamorous in the show-dance/sex-dance trade.

All these pieces had as much fun as Byrd with the strategies of sexual salesmanship. All of them showcased their companies as skillfully. But all of them also had greater conceptual ambition--much more on the brain. And that’s the one body part that Byrd conspicuously neglects.