Of moving bodies and moving images

Producer Deborah Brockus has become the mother superior of L.A. dance by offering a leg up to emerging artists who have promising ideas for pieces but no showcase opportunities.

A flirtation with media dominates her “Caught Between” series, and the latest installment, at the Ivar Theatre on Sunday, offered a cornucopia of approaches -- many of them preliminary. You don’t become a film-savvy director-choreographer overnight.

Brockus and three other women danced against projections of the most glorious stained glass on Earth in “Les Yeux de Chartres.” But, perhaps inevitably, her tasteful, subdued choreography got lost in the glow. After all, what dancing could ever eclipse those rose windows?

Also using a realistic projected environment, Isabel Valverde’s clever “Fado Dance #4” shoehorned images of Valverde into shots of the Portuguese landscape to dramatize her failed and often uproarious attempts to connect with her heritage.

Self-inspection similarly obsessed Rei Aoo in “Mirror,” featuring her deftly interacting with a projected double. But, however promising, the result looked awfully tentative some 60 years after Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire danced in counterpoint with their own images.

More developed: Shauna Walker’s gutsy solo “And from across the room, through a crowd of faceless people, I saw her.... “ Here the use of an indistinct light show behind Walker depicted her estrangement from a singles bar that eventually came into focus and obliterated her.

Candy Olsen’s neatly executed solo “Wake Up” exploited the same structure, but neither her use of liquid images nor her abrupt ending added up. The juxtaposition of projections and live dancing looked equally arbitrary and directionless in both Courtney Combs’ quartet “Cliffs Notes Chapter 3” and Christina Ayala’s quartet “Little Big Head and the Three Oris.”

Tito Reyes’ “Did You Hear Me?” needs a bit more tweaking before its prosaic film environment and fantasy dance septet (performed live) can mesh to communicate his concept.

Besides interactions between live dancers and projections, “Caught Between” offered conventional screenings of dance films -- none more potent than “Madrugada,” in which Deborah Greenfield and William Morrison evoked the primal force of flamenco by fusing Greenfield’s dancing with the parched vistas of Death Valley.

Two versions of Sallie DeEtte Mackie’s “Dagslanda” artfully layered images to emphasize the ephemeral nature of dance. One represented pure abstraction, the other a cavalcade of some of Los Angeles’ most distinctive performers.

A kind of miniature Hollywood musical, Richard Kuller’s “Time Step” suffered from substandard image quality and sound but offered a witty portrait of life in local dance studios en route to its charming tap finale.

Too brief for its own good, Nina McNeely’s intense “Finalente” showed Jessica Keller picturesquely wallowing in crumpled paper, but it ended just as the dancing developed a genuine impetus.