Wing Healey Proves Expressive, If Exhausted

Whether he portrays an operatic other woman, a Greek demigoddess or the matriarch of modern dance, Peter Wing Healey always seems to be channeling Norma Desmond at her most florid.

Unfortunately, his backdated glamour and grandiose emotionalism wore thin during his “Death of Isadora” program Tuesday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. What sustained him was something rarer.

A frequent soloist with the Mark Morris Dance Group, Wing Healey is a master of expressive gesture--nearly a lost art in the dance world. So even if he’s the wrong sex, and the wrong weight, for some of his roles, his massive arms and hands carve the air with spectacular force. And he uses them with such imagination that it’s easy to overlook the lapses in tone and the waning stamina that weaken his performances.

“We Are All Amneris” (his newest solo) finds him acting out the judgment scene from “Aida” to recorded Verdi, wearing a cascade of golden fabrics edged in black. (Karolyn Kiisel and Wing Healey designed his ornate costumes.)

His haughty Opera Queen characterization plays effectively enough, but his dancing never consistently supports it: Sometimes he flits, sometimes he galumphs. But only his sculptural gestures and metaphoric use of a long costume train add anything really memorable to the music.

In “Siren,” the escalating surge of Richard Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier” waltzes leaves Wing Healey looking winded and often undercuts the mood and action plan he’s creating. (Where’s Debussy when you really need him?) But as a half-woman, half-bird, half-Occidental, half-Oriental figure from ancient legend, he marshals mime resources that very few current dancers could half match.

“The Death of Isadora” sidesteps both Duncan technique and what actually happened to her on the day she died. Instead we get an elaborate, impressionistic character study and dance-of-death adroitly set to Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” However, the performance emerges neither tragic nor sympathetic--merely manic. Somehow, Wing Healey can’t depict Isadora without judging her harshly, and an Isadora without stature is no Isadora at all.