‘Angels’: Radiant but Earthbound

As seen at the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Saturday, the Iona Pear Dance Theatre begins “The Mythology of Angels” with a visionary coup de thea^tre: five people in street clothes performing ordinary tasks while shadowed, guided and protected by figures who are their exact doubles except for the dead-white of their costumes and makeup.

Do you want to believe in guardian angels? Director-choreographer Cheryl Flaharty gives you that belief back in this simple, spiritual stage picture--the first of many pictorial wonders in her full-evening, 1992 piece for her Honolulu-based company.

There are angels of war drawn majestically around the stage in a chariot, fallen angels suffering in isolated, strongly etched Surrealist images and a procession of angels from different lands or eras--their costumes and headpieces created by eight designers.

Finally, there are figures who may not be angels at all: women engulfed by swirling, windblown fabric or letting it trail out into space as an enormous cape, plus nearly nude humanoid creatures of polished silver swinging from ropes in a storm of glitter-dust.

Set to a collage of lush, taped music--with Enya, Dead Can Dance and Ennio Morricone especially prominent--and benefiting from Donald Ranney Jr.’s resourceful lighting design, “The Mythology of Angels” dramatizes the power of slowness, concentration and spatial design. And when performed by an artist such as Malia Oliver, who can make the smallest wing-stretch eloquent, the production casts a genuine spell.

But the components never add up to dance, for whenever Flaharty’s 10-member company forsakes her emphasis on locked-down gestural and processional tableaux, the evening becomes hopelessly mundane. The elaborate costumes yield no original movement possibilities. The few conventional dance passages make most of the company members look technically feeble, and the power of dancing to transform static pictorial images into a deep-in-the-body kinesthetic statement never occurs.

The dance sensibility simply isn’t there. Flaharty is evidently a designer-director rather than a choreographer, and were she working with opera singers, her ability to create and sustain powerful stage pictures without imposing complex movement demands might prove invaluable.

Ultimately, though, “The Mythology of Angels” undercuts her abilities by believing too strongly in the mythology of choreography--that it’s about image rather than motion, that artfully arranged feathers weigh more than artfully deployed feet. Some myths die hard; this one died very slowly in Glendale on Saturday.