An Exciting Night of Ballet, Piano Improv

Swirling across a small carpeted stage at the Skirball Cultural Center on Thursday, Marla Bingham danced with such a powerful expressive focus, and such unerring technical surety, that it became hard to believe that this locally based ballet choreographer and teacher was making up her solo moment by moment.

However this exciting “Dance of Life” benefit program for the Vital Options cancer support network coupled Bingham’s improvisational dancing with equally impromptu pianism by film and television composer William Goldstein. As Vital Options founder Selma R. Schimmel explained in her opening remarks, “We don’t know what we will see and hear tonight, and neither do they.”

Maybe not, but liquid imagery unified the first half of Bingham’s 10-minute performance, from her metaphoric use of a gleaming aqua cape to her surging, eddying paths. Improvising classical ballet can be risky even on an ideal floor, so it was understandable that Bingham wore soft slippers rather than pointe shoes.

*

But her hyperextended classical line gave an extra sheen even to the passages later in the solo where she explored a quick, sharp, darting range of motion punctuated by moments of smiling stillness.

Most of the program belonged to Goldstein, a practiced exponent of what he called “emotionally connective” music. He was very adroit, whether working with his composition “Cycles” from his recent “First Impressions” CD (“I’ll play the part I remember and make up the rest”), or taking a three-note motif from an audience member and creating a subdued, meditative etude that proved one of the evening’s highlights.

Unfortunately, many of his attacks sounded painfully thunderous in this intimate room, and for all the formal complexity of his best inventions, he doubled back on himself overmuch, leaving his endings anticlimactic.

Moreover, where Bingham sometimes abandoned conventional dancing altogether for passages of fluid gesture, Goldstein always stayed inside a concert-hall context, exploring a number of styles (neo-baroque to quasi-impressionist) but never daring to be as simply, directly communicative as his dancing collaborator.