Worlds-Apart Artists Explore Universal Themes

Drawing from an eclectic well on Friday, the annual COLA (City of Los Angeles) performance series began its final weekend on two stages in the Los Angeles Theatre Center with mostly new works by modern dance choreographer Victoria Marks and classical Cambodian dancer-choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro. For their stylistic differences, however, the worlds-apart artists offered up a handful of universal themes: love, mortality, grief, passion.

According to press notes, Marks’ premiere, “Against Ending,” although informed by the events of Sept. 11, is more a rant against endings for which one is unprepared. In a barrage of in-your-face moves danced heroically by Maria Gillespie, Stephanie Nugent and Karen Schupp, the notion of being clobbered by the unfathomable let loose a host of emotions as the trio took on guises of airplanes (widespread fluttering arms), buildings (swaying, crumbling), and people (crawling, rueful head-shaking) from that horrific day.

Set to Amy Denio’s hauntingly aggressive score, the 22-minute opus, masterfully lighted by Carol McDowell, saw the dancers sporadically interrupted by a series of short blackouts. The music, too, built up before stopping suddenly as the performers assumed runners’ stances or gesticulated upward. Relentlessly kinetic, this powerful piece concluded with a glaringly lighted, empty stage.

Marks’ “July Gone” (2000), a witty treatise on dance-making, featured the London-based Bedlam Dance Company--Marie Fitzpatrick, Yael Flexer, Fiona Millward and Maria Ryan. Displaying rubbery bodies while spouting narrative on why they continue to dance, this quartet, a kind of terpsichorean Marx Brothers, ended with a barefoot unison shuffle.

While Marks made use of epic tragedy, Shapiro personalized death in her premiere, “The Glass Box,” a new solo based on the assassination of a Cambodian friend who had an affair with that country’s prime minister. Initially performed on a platform and enhanced by shadows cast by the dancer, Shapiro, dripping in the traditional elegance of a sparkling gold costume and headdress, made every move a study in beauty and depth.

Accompanied by six stellar musicians on Cambodian instruments, the 15-minute work flowed from the hypnotically slow with sinewy hand gestures weaving wondrous patterns in the air, to an accelerated, tiny-stepping motif. Shapiro, cloaked in an air of other-worldliness, maintained a sense of resignation to her fate.

Also infused by fate: the six-minute piece “The Honeymoon,” a scene from Shapiro’s concert-length classical dance drama adapted from Shakespeare’s “Othello.” Shapiro’s Desdemona (here called Khanitha Devi), partnered by Charya Burt’s Othello (Samritechak, or “dark prince”), both clad in Cambodian dress, created a lovely tableau, underneath which lay deceit, jealousy and murder.

The work, which premiered in 2000 in Phnom Penh, was intended as a cultural bridge between two worlds--a classical Western story couched in classical Cambodian dance. Shapiro’s take--in which Othello ultimately pleads for punishment instead of forgiveness--is a metaphor for the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s genocidal 1975-1979 reign.

“Tep Monorom (Heavenly Bliss),” a traditional number performed by Shapiro, Burt, Tina Toun and Julie Nuth saw the quartet seemingly float across the stage in a work demonstrating that the heavens are in harmony.