Mizeranydance a Marvel for Its Moves Alone

A locally based modern dancer of high technical and expressive authority, Michael Mizerany also choreographs intimate, elliptical dance dramas about the conflict between innate individual needs and oppressive societal norms.

Enlisting 10 members of what he calls Mizeranydance, the two-act “Edgewalkers” represented Mizerany’s largest-scale exploration of this theme to date. In its premiere Friday at the L.A. Theatre Center, it also contained some of his best dance ideas and worst dramatic strategies.

Wedding sci-fi mysticism to sleazy soap opera, the delirious plot took bisexual Jeff Bulkley from the corseted, closeted 19th century, where the only sex seemed to be furtive gay encounters, through a time portal borrowed from “Star Gate” into a facsimile of contemporary West Hollywood. Here the underdressed women’s corps collectively ravished him, Mizerany repeatedly seduced him, and nightclub emcee Brian Pelletier behaved as if auditioning for a road company of “Cabaret.”

Enter Stephanie Scott as Bulkley’s 19th century fiancee, intent on reclaiming him, and no wonder: As the only halfway straight male in two centuries, he justified her desperation, as well as the jealous anger of gun-toting, lip-syncing transsexual Lisa Gillespie.

As this story doubled back on itself, Mizerany’s show-biz routines proved ever more smirky and faceless and his dramatic episodes increasingly dogged and repetitive. His timidity also undercut the depiction of contemporary freedoms--the way he nervously covered himself with a small volume of Walt Whitman in his brief flash of nudity, for example, or his use of an expurgated version of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” to accompany the big homosexual bedroom scene.

So why care or even watch? Because the serious dances themselves were so well made and admirably executed that it became possible to enjoy them as pure movement expression without reference to their overwrought pretexts and one-note characterizations. If you could forget the ideas and focus on the moves, you could see genuine talent well on the way toward a breakthrough.

Those endless passages in which Scott literally threw herself at Bulkley, for instance, went nowhere emotionally but displayed her inexhaustible daring and his partnering prowess with great choreographic surety. Similarly, all the dropped trousers and pantomime foreplay of Mizerany’s sex scenes betrayed his impressive ability to convey erotic heat, energy and deep need abstractly through convulsive gymnastic action and bold athletic interplay.

Even when physicalizing extreme 19th century rigidity, Mizerany managed to keep his dancers looking mobile and even enviably pliant. And from Scott, in an impossibly obnoxious clinging-vine role, he inspired a performance rich in nuance and unstinting in commitment. Nearly every character wanted and used Bulkley one way or the other, but only Scott made you believe she loved him.

For all of Bulkley’s reliability as a dancer, “Edgewalkers” left him a sexual doormat all evening long and Mizerany gave himself all of two expressions: sour when wearing a shirt and smug after taking it off. Miscast as a transsexual, Gillespie always seemed just another woman obstructing a male love affair--and Mizerany’s insistence on her lip-syncing ballads instead of dancing them added one more disastrous miscalculation.

Shannon Harris, Paige Blend, Jessica Harper, Sara Storrie and Laila Abdullah completed the cast. Recorded Bach and Bartok accompanied the 19th century scenes while everything from show tunes to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy reinforced Mizerany’s confused celebration of modern freedoms.

His program synopsis spoke of “the biases of the 19th century” following Bulkley and “threatening to destroy” his newfound “love, sex and acceptance in the 21st century.” In fact, Mizerany choreographed a far different story--one about a mindless wimp who found love and sex in both centuries but ended up as easily manipulated by his boyfriend in the present as his girlfriend in the past.

“Edgewalkers,” Mizeranydance, Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., downtown L.A. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 3 p.m. Through Sunday. $16 to $20. (213) 473-0660.