‘Garden Tour’: Raphael’s Art Leaps Onstage

The lushly upholstered bodies in the High Renaissance drawings of Raphael reveal a physical ideal radically different from the tightly muscled definition of contemporary dancers. But choreographer Brenda Way made a heroic attempt to animate the artist’s vision in her new “Garden Tour: Impressions of Raphael” at the Getty Center on Saturday.

A complement to the Getty’s ongoing “Raphael and His Circle” exhibition, Way’s one-act movement study enlisted the 11 dancers of her ODC/San Francisco company along with mobile sculpture units designed by Alexander V. Nicols that suggested tall, whitened cypress trees.

A score by Jay Cloidt incorporated spoken passages relating to the layout of Renaissance gardens, but Raphael’s use of landscape seemed to interest Way less than his evocation of drama through intense, twisty poses.

Whether tracing literal narratives (the Adam and Eve sequences) or enigmatic interactions between dancers (a woman sleeping on a rippling platform formed by the backs of three kneeling men), Way’s dramatic vignettes took place in isolated knots, with other images and activities filling the stage of the Harold M. Williams Auditorium as if the piece were a living sketch pad or notebook.

Where she failed was letting these scattered and sometimes arbitrary Raphaelite collages obliterate the search for the exact, essential image that his art embodied. Moreover, she frequently resorted to Raphaelizing passages from works presented earlier on the program--especially the duets about sexual oppression that formed a central theme in her new ensemble piece, “24 Exposures.”

Beginning and ending with the image of a woman perched on a man’s back, “24 Exposures” spent less time depicting women as a burden than men as forever physically restricting and subduing their female partners.

Way’s program note described the work as a look back at her aesthetic evolution over the 30 years since ODC was founded. As a career summation, it revealed her talent for original movement invention--particularly fast, complex combinations of vocabularies that alternately challenged and showcased her dancers’ versatility. But her development of ideas remained only cursory here and her use of Edgar Meyers’ music often downright insensitive in mood and tempo.

Way’s faults vanished, however, in “John Somebody,” a fresh, playful 1989 quintet (revised in 1993) to music by Scott Johnson. Imaginative, unpredictable and beautifully executed, it displayed a focused sense of characterization closer to Raphael’s priorities than anything that she created in his name for “Garden Tour.”