McCaleb Finds Rhythm in Repetition

You have to be wary of interpreting a dance whose title tells you twice that things may not be what they seem. Even describing Nancy McCaleb’s new “The Impersonation of Mr. Peacock (Part 1: The Liar),” a collaboration with her company and with Belgian artist Francis Alys, has its pitfalls.

Seen Friday at Sherwood Auditorium at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, in La Jolla, the piece appears to revisit a single event again and again, each time expanding on it or putting it in a larger or different context.

Eric Geiger walks into a group of starkly lighted dancers (Aly Fischer, Sarah Fanoe-Kaye, Greg Lane, Elizabeth Licea and Elizabeth Swallow) sitting tensely on chairs, looking toward the forward left corner of the stage. He rights a fallen chair, sits with them. There’s a sudden blackout, the sound of thunder, and when the lights come on, everyone has fallen onto the floor.

In the ensuing repetitions, we see that they do not so much fall as explode out of the chairs. Over the course of the 30-minute work, this explosive event will recur in solos and various groupings and contexts, as well as in Eloisa Haudenschild’s film images of the dancers projected behind them.

The dancers will also deliver silent speeches to unseen auditors. They will observe each other, sometimes as objects of laughter. Vignettes suggesting relationships will emerge. Haudenschild’s film images will incorporate office and apartment buildings, a reminder of Sept. 11? Christopher Zurfluh’s neo-Baroque, Minimalist music will add poignant emotional color.

At the end, as if completing the event with which the dance began, Geiger will walk off stage, leaving everyone behind in the same position they were in at the opening of the dance.

Overall, the work remained mystifying, impersonal and at times vague in directing a viewer’s focus. But the finely honed dancers were compelling to watch.

The program opened with McCaleb’s “Verdigris,” commissioned by the museum and premiered last year. Early press material announced that it would be “danced in memory of company member, Ricardo Peralta,” who died suddenly last year in Honolulu at age 39. This note did not appear in the final program booklet, but the central focus, isolation and involvement of a single dancer (Geiger) with the others evoked that kind of tribute.

Haudenschild’s dark-toned video images of leaves and trees, moving in different directions, provided a larger context for the events. When the images turned solarized toward the end, they reinforced a sense of shift of the dancers into another dimension.