Do you remember Eurotrash? Too bad

In form and content, “Aura” is exactly what many people are afraid a modern dance performance will be but seldom is on major stages: a woozy grab bag of movement ideas that fail to connect with one another, showcase the dancers effectively or dramatize the synopsis in the program booklet.

Presented at the REDCAT on Wednesday, this collaboration between Cecilia Appleton’s Contradanza from Mexico and Rosanna Gamson/World Wide from L.A. adapted a 1962 short story by Carlos Fuentes notable for merging past and present, dreams and reality, into 89 minutes of nostalgia for the bankrupt choreographic effects and strategies of Eurotrash.

Indeed, everything about “Aura” seemed so fundamentally over -- so long since done -- that the Wednesday performance played not so much as a U.S. premiere as a revival, showing us where experimental dance had briefly, disastrously dallied once upon a time.

The old-hat neo-Expressionist hoopla began with long speeches delivered in a deliberately supercilious tone a la Performance Art 101, and it also included the portentous use of nudity, carnival spectacle (a stilt dancer trailing yards of parachute silk) and even a monkey dance to something like Indian rhythm-syllables. Plus lots of yammering in the dark.

You like joyless couplings? You got ‘em. Rubber gloves and underwear? Seek no further. Over-the-top facial grotesquerie? Gaze your fill. Choreographers profoundly alienated from their cultures? On view through Sunday.

The final speech tried to tell us that people can’t connect with one another in any meaningful way, but we were already believers because, from the start, Appleton and Gamson made “Aura” a monument to this proposition, avoiding all the ways that powerful dancing can engulf and unite us. Sending their companies scrambling through endless discontinuities, they marginalized unison movement partly though lighting that showed us the participants piecemeal rather than highlighting the shared pulse of the moment.

Similarly, when narrator Richard Gallegos spoke about the lure of shadows -- how “what is obscured is infinitely more interesting than what is revealed” -- it struck a chord because the sight of “Aura” dancers writhing pointlessly on their little islands of light was always less compelling than the choreographies we could remember or invent in our minds when gazing at the shadows on the REDCAT walls.

Appleton and Gamson intended “Aura” to be bilingual, but many of Ulises Martinez’s speeches became lost in the sonic murk provided by composers David Gamson, Alejandro Escuer and Yseye M. Appleton, so only Gallegos stayed consistently audible.

The music ranged from blaring rock to a soft retro waltz, and also included harsh sound effects streaming over the dancers. None of it helped “Aura” express Fuentes’ vision of overlapping layers of time, because the choreography never sought to evoke any particular era or establish any reality against which dreams and memories could be highlighted.

Instead, the choreographers bypassed storytelling and characterization to develop diversionary ideas about hiding in fabric or manipulating it. Perhaps the most artful example -- and one of the few coherent links to Fuentes’ narrative -- came early on when a long, wide, hammock-like strip of linen served to separate the participants in a job interview and also, as it rose and fell, to display and then conceal several tantalizing character tableaux.

But those tableaux, the work’s many gymnastic feats and even the 11-member cast’s fine dancing never took you very far into Fuentes’ world or brought any understanding of the key characters inhabiting it. So when a speech mocked us for letting our own expectations seduce us in life and art, the put-down seemed a prime example of the choreographers’ failure to know their own limitations.

Expectations about this exercise in outmoded aesthetics? Hardly. As an act of dance seduction, “Aura” remained pretty much a dry hustle: always promising more than it was ever prepared to deliver and always making Appleton and Gamson appear to be minor artists with a giant conceptual tiger by the tail. It might not be the worst new piece of 2005, but it’s surely the most fatally out of touch.

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‘Aura’

Where: REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, downtown L.A.

When: 8:30 p.m. today through Sunday

Price: $20 to $32

Contact: (213) 237-2800