On the plus side, at least there was ‘There’ there

There’s not much worse than an evening spent in the theater listening to pretentious text intoned by bad actors clad in dreadful costumes. Unless, that is, the actors are dancers executing agonizing works of endlessly repetitive and, by and large, empty choreography.

This was the case Saturday night at the Electric Lodge in Venice when San Francisco-based Dandelion Dancetheater, whose co-artistic directors, Kimiko Guthrie and Eric Kupers, served up a mostly unappetizing two-hour stew of performance slop. The exception was Guthrie’s 10-minute opus, “There.” A meditation on time, four dancers -- Kupers, Frank Shawl, Rebecca Johnson and Debby Kajiyama -- moved with purpose and poignancy to Guthrie’s reading of her own text.

Here the words didn’t cloy but illuminated the dance: Kupers rebelled against the passing of time (“I won’t be like my father”) as he and the older Shawl engaged in push-pull antics. The women also had an aura of authenticity, their emotions ranging from melancholia to joy in arabesques and lifts.

Unfortunately, the evening nosedived into cliched tedium.

Guthrie’s “You,” a Los Angeles premiere, plumbed relationships, with six dancers spouting her B-movie-like lines. “You were the evil vampire haunting me at night,” became the backdrop to the arm-flailing sextet that hurled their bodies and walked zombie-like. Thankfully, Ryan Francesconi provided sonic diversion, performing his music live on guitar and computer, with an engaging Isabel Douglass on accordion.

Kupers’ 40-minute L.A. premiere, “Octagon,” based on the body’s eight main chakras, featured five dancers and four musicians, including drums, stand-up bass and Patrick Cress’ wailing saxophone. Books were piled high in the middle of the floor, as artist Nancy Ostrovsky threw paint on a black canvas at the rear of the stage. For all her fierce posturing, Ostrovsky should have uber-slapped those colors but instead created feeble mask-like faces and the outline of a woman’s body.

The dancers, meanwhile, ran in circles and soul-searched on tree stumps. There was no connection among the music, the painting and the uninspired cavorting, with Kupers’ video projections further obliterating any attempt at cohesion.