When movement, speech meet

Speech can color dancing in many ways, but a stimulating hourlong program titled “A Window on Movement and Language” focused on running commentary -- the act of describing and interpreting physical actions as they happened -- in the Mark Taper Auditorium of the Los Angeles Central Library on Thursday.

Part of the library’s ongoing “Aloud” series, the event began and ended with Simone Forti, a pioneer of postmodernism so open to the world around her, and so adept at translating thought into motion, that her improvisational solos are a miraculous fusion of an observant, inventive mind and a keenly articulate body.

Forti began by reading excerpts from her new book, “Oh, Tongue,” and even when seated on a chair created a sense of motion with her constant use of water imagery. But the book also contained references to war and terrorism, so an imaginary conversation with her dead father became a meditation on an increasingly threatening world of “winner take all, loser die.”

The latest in her series of impromptu “News Animations” found Forti spreading sections from The Times and L.A. Weekly across the stage, sprawling on them, using them as steppingstones or crumbling their pages against her body as she responded to their subjects and photographs.

A passage in which she arranged the papers into a map of the Caribbean showed her trying to make sense of world events. But perhaps the most atmospheric moments came when she slipped into memory, remembering playing at the La Brea tar pits as a child or the simple pleasures of eating soup.

Other artists on the program developed a more confrontational connection between dancing and talking. In the duet “Turning My Head to the Left,” Carmela Hermann explored her relationship with Luke Johnson through a war of words based on moves they announced and performed (“I’m taking three steps to the side”). The encounter proved to be full of wild, unpredictable, emotional swings.

Fiercely competitive at first, the duet switched to a mock courtship (“Come here often?”) and then an exercise in Bush-era newspeak (“I’m putting my weapon of mass destruction on your ear”) before reaching a final, hard-won acceptance of reality (“I’m standing still”). Some challenging lifts occurred midway through, but mostly the dancing focused on matched, side-by-side passagework.

For its part, Victoria Marks’ satiric “Creation” warned against the dangers of over-interpretation, as Dan Froot and Peter Carpenter offered progressively bizarre descriptions of the gestural solo that Marks kept dancing throughout the piece.

Ranging in style from hyper-energetic sportscasting (“Just look at those reflexes!”) to florid poeticizing (“blowing on the feathers of remembrance”) to demented sexual obsession (“They say no but they mean yes”), Froot and Carpenter subjected Marks’ solo to every possible interpretive distortion.

Call it a warning to overambitious dance academics -- and critics such as this one. While we’re watching them, they’re watching us.