Martinez Dancetheatre: Moved by the Music

Lyrically expressive dance has a hard time of it these days, what with our sensibilities fractured in so many ways, we often wait impatiently for irony to emerge from a mood that’s simply presented. But Francisco Martinez hasn’t received that memo yet. There is something pure but sometimes painful in his attempts to make uplifted balletic movement inspired by the emotional dynamics in music masterworks.

On the small Mainstage Theatre of L.A. Valley College in Van Nuys Saturday night, the dancers of Francisco Martinez Dancetheatre had big assignments they were sometimes able to fulfill. In the new suite “Sing to Me of Love,” set to ardent Ralph Vaughan Williams music, for instance, Lisa Gillespie looked as if her body could express every yearning in the book. Blessed with a beautifully articulate line, she unfolded as if it were the first time she’d drawn breath, and contracted with such wary grace, it seemed the earth shook a little with her disappointment. She was the only one of four dancers (mostly interacting as two couples) who could sustain the fervid but somewhat unvarying mood.

The other premiere of the evening, “Veiled Symphony,” also depended on melancholy, this time more directly, as five women used traditional mourning gestures and, briefly, pale chiffon panels, to embody loss in sculptural groupings. Wearing long, maroon, velvet dresses, they seemed a bit like medieval maidens or muses dedicated to loss. The score consisted of songs from Johannes Brahms’ “A German Requiem.” As with the previous piece, it sometimes felt as if you were in the hands of the composer more than the choreographer.

In “Nachtliche Tanze” (2000), an abstrusely comic work that closed the program, old recordings of 1930s German cabaret songs called the tune. There was much inflated prancing and posing--the best of it by Michael Mizerany, playing tennis with balloons the way Valentino might have--which might have been a nod to irony. But it seemed so earnestly shaped, it was hard to tell.