‘Re-Percussions’ Performances Flag at Finish

Ballets with intriguing premises and performances but no real endings made the “Re-Percussions” program by La Danserie seem strangely incomplete at Highways Performance Space on Thursday. Clearly this local collective knows how to dance but not how to stop.

Performed in three installments between other pieces, Lisa K. Lock’s “Tea for Two” ended with a burst of feathers overhead: a special effect scarcely pertinent to the central images of an imaginative relationship duet alternately played out on skates, a line of chairs and a revolving platform.

In Lock’s “Winged,” five women emerging from net clusters--which could be seen as insectile membranes or body veils--united in mutual support. But besides displaying shaky execution, their final gymnastic lifts seemed an afterthought: a forced conclusion to a piece more memorable for its strong expressions of isolation and yearning.

These same feelings fueled “Deviation,” Lock’s powerful solo for Jennifer Usyak in which the key passages found her stretched out on a chair, virtually upside down.

Fielding three more yearning women, Jennifer McDonald Wilson’s technically demanding but curiously prim tango ballet “Imagenes en el Espejo” looked its best in its contrasting solos, especially the complex, if curiously Frenchified one for Lock.

Artistic director Patrick Frantz supplied a sophisticated large-scale coda to the Danserie program: “Triptych,” which deftly fused swirling neoclassical formalism with a feminist agenda but which, again, lacked a strong finish.

Guest choreographers Frit and Frat Fuller contributed one of their clever lifestyle parodies, “At the Rue,” which showed six women in men’s suits obsessively scanning the Wall Street Journal and trembling at each discovery.

* La Danserie performs “Re-Percussions” tonight and Dec. 22 and 23 at 8:30 p.m. at Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. $15. (310) 315-1459.