Life Lessons on Balance from Marion Scott

Now in her late 70s, dancer-choreographer Marion Scott has a message about life: Balance is the key. The third in her series of “Spirit Dances,” which were done over the past year at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, was therefore called “Yin/Yang,” and featured five duets based on oppositional words--”Masculine/Feminine,” “Firm/Yielding” and the like.

But embodying oppositions gets tricky when the overall movement style is dreamy. On Friday night, in the first of three weekend performances, there were a few bursts of frustration in the movements of the 10-member cast, presided over by Scott, who sat at the side, looking concerned and troubled. Yet everything tended to take on a sameness, improvising in a portentous and sometimes disjointedly bland mood.

A few of the duets started to take shape, especially “Frenetic/Calm,” between Carmela Hermann and Edgar Ovando. The two musicians, as elsewhere, chose one dancer to accompany--cellist Maria Royce picked up Hermann’s inventive vibrations; Kabbalah Bach used percussion and voice to provide a languorous score for Ovando.

Dressed in loose black and white clothing, the rest of the cast surrounded each duo, echoing its movements and reaching out toward duet dancers supportively. Much of the action resembled contact improvisation and took place on the floor.

Despite the sense that all of this was more meaningful in private than in public, Scott brought it all together in the final moments of the 45-minute piece with a touching, wise-elder moment.

Amid dancers who started tugging at each other, darting and racing around, Scott arose, clutching a stone she had been waving like a wand throughout and aimed it at each dancer, who then was stilled.

As she stood with arms outstretched in a beam of light from above, you could read one word that was carved in stone: “balance.” Turning to place the rock at the center of a yin-yang symbol painted on the floor, she then fell backward with the effort, into the arms of two dancers who were forming part of a circle, linking arms. She was down, she was up again, ready to deal with the fray, hoping she’d left her message behind.

Ah, balance in all things. There’s nothing like it.