Audience Politely Included in ‘Light’ Ritual

It’s a monumental task to create a meaningful new ritual--something that takes over your head and your heart in an ancient, singing way, something that you recognize and revere as it plugs you into a communal force field in which you feel part of everything and gloriously singular at the same time.

And that’s what Trip Dance Theater wants to do with “Light,” the first of four “performance/ritual” events spread over the next year, which it has called the Sacred Spaces Series.

Trip, a locally based six-member dance collective founded by Monica Favand, joins a theatrical tradition that had its heyday in the happenings and experimental plays of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. It was all about breaking the fourth wall, discovering spontaneous connections and getting art closer to life. “Light” (directed by Nina Kaufman) takes a mild-mannered layer of that tradition in its polite inclusion of the audience, and its use of certain elements of Asian religious ceremony, filtered through a post-hippie sensibility.

With incense burning in the third-floor lobby of an abandoned office building (a space rented for the occasion), each audience member was greeted and escorted into a vast room that must have held a few dozen workstations at one time, but now was dotted with performance islands of rock salt and sand, with branches and white-draped sculptures. Various areas were moodily lighted as the audience (barely outnumbering the performers) dutifully followed the slow-motion action around the room, being drawn into a lugubrious line dance, sitting on the floor, getting up, sitting again and taking handfuls of sand to be dumped into a mandela-like centerpiece.

But mainly the dancers did the performing--a crawl through the pebbles, sinuous arm waving, lyrically standing on one leg in a bucket of sand. An interesting sound collage (by Charlie Campagna and Nina Kaufman) moved from heartbeats to whispering, from to flutes and guitar. The performers wore loose-fitting white clothing (the audience was asked to wear white as well, though not everyone complied).

At the end of an hour, the ritual climaxed with a chant of indecipherable syllables and a circle fretted prettily with rising arms in patterns around a clutch of candles. In the silence that followed, it felt as if something should have been achieved--that was the format, the creation of a special space with grave, dream-like procedures. But what shared belief or power had been tapped?

The only resonant moment of the evening had already passed--in “Wish,” choreographed by Favand and Elaine Wang. Dancing alone on a box, drenched in the light of changing slides, Wang seemed to be participating in a private ritual. The photos sometimes looked like her family snapshots, the recorded voice could have been a monologue about what she expected in life, and for just a moment--as she sank moodily into a place where her face merged with the projected image of an expectant, dressed-up little girl--there was something to share, an electronic rite of passage, from snapshot memory to burdened adult.

The fact is, meaningful ritual is based on shared beliefs and circumstances, and seeing a theater performance about nothing in particular isn’t enough to bring people truly together, even when they’re willing. The theater itself is a sacred space--you don’t need candles and incense to delineate it. You need substance and resonance to take people to a place where they believe.

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* “Light,” Trip Dance Theater, 425 South Main St, Los Angeles, tonight, 8 p.m. and Sunday, 7 p.m. $10. (323) 468-9938.