A Mellower Hysterica Turns to Ongoing Relationships

In its first three years on the local scene, Kitty McNamee’s Hysterica Dance Company lived up to its name with flamboyant, manic-depressive modernism steeped in pop dance. But now, in year four, McNamee is bridging her former extremes, with her appealing if uneven “Threads” program Sunday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre prioritizing a mellower, new style.

Call it Hysterica without hysteria, a style less focused on violent juxtapositions than on ongoing relationships. She still made us-versus-them statements in which her dancers protectively banded together--though, significantly, the strongest example of this Sunday came from assistant choreographer Ryan Heffington in his edgy group piece “Seemed Seamless.”

Here the dancers covered their eyes with their hands but continued to reach out--and to offer loner Erin Giraud their collective support, comfort and embrace.

Hands covering the dancers’ ears punctuated McNamee’s intriguing opening duet for Heffington and Lisa Eaton, an essay in matched low-to-the ground stretches, shared partnering gambits and wary mutual attraction.

In the dreamlike “Milk Trio” and “Cream Trio,” however, she set swirly, quasi-balletic moves to classical music against the backdrop of films showing the dancers sleeping peacefully with one another, three to a bed. And she based a three-part duet, “The Sun,” on recorded descriptions by dancers Shari Nyce and Jamie Thompson of their failed affair.

These pieces tested Hysterica in different ways--overtaxing Giraud’s and R.J. Durell’s technical control in the lyrical duet “Man/Child/Woman” and pushing Nyce and Thompson beyond their expressive range in the “Sun” duets.

However this last failure seemed partly conceptual: In words and movement, the Nyce/Thompson relationship always seemed overly cute and even illusory, depending too much on glossy partnering cliches in the depiction of its finest hour to matter much when it ended. Nor did Thompson’s neo-Romantic pursuit of Sara Storrie in “The Moon” lead to any deeper vision. McNamee easily plugs into multiple mind-sets these days, but it’s a loss that she no longer claims one as her own.

Besides embellishing the two lactose trios, clever films by Kenneth Hughes offered ultra-close-ups of Hysterica personnel, collages of found objects, animals and vistas--plus, in “Mr. Freeway,” a cherishable vision of a Southland jogger transfixed by love.

Music by Tim Labor provided a lush wash of textures and colors in half the pieces. In addition to the dancers listed, the company included Bubba Carr, master of introspective riffs in the solo “Changeling.”