Gimmickry leaves dancers high, dry

Defined by stage design, costume transformations, music and special effects, Hiroshi Koike’s “Ship in a View” used the versatile 12-dancer Pappa Tarahumara company from Japan as adjuncts to a theatrical experience in which dance played a largely subsidiary role. Worse, that experience ran aground when it abandoned any sort of sustained movement impetus or drive and instead emphasized repetitive cycles of fits and starts.

Presented on the UCLA Live dance series in Royce Hall on Friday, this plotless, 100-minute abstraction of mundane seaside life in the 1960s featured a blue-gray backdrop by Koike and Naomi Fukushima that periodically rose to reveal a row of tiny lights across the bottom evoking a distant city across the water.

An enormous post or mast stood center stage, and when a gossamer blue-gray flag was raised on it, an electric fan descended from above the stage to make the flag unfurl. Later, a light began to revolve at its peak, penetrating the waves of mist or smoke that added still more blue-grayness.

The cast initially wore dowdy charcoal costumes (mostly stylized street-wear) by Koji Hamai, but they too suffered a blue-gray sea change by the end, when two dozen glittering lightbulbs descended to simulate a dazzling star-scape.

Yukiko Sekine was credited for the lighting, with Hiroyuki Moriwaki listed for “light object,” and whatever that meant, the environmental atmosphere of the piece remained arguably its most memorable achievement.

No fewer than three people were credited for “object design,” doubtless referring to the large aerial sled that descended to pick up a passenger. Or the tiny ship and revolving wheel moving across the stage on their own power.

Or the two mannequins -- one with a video screen for a head -- that became witnesses to the finale.

Koike kept his cast as active as the pingpong balls that got hurled everywhere in one sequence -- usually juxtaposing prosaic pantomime with faceless group choreography -- but the piece quickly seemed more of a gallery installation than a dance performance because the visual novelty of “Ship in a View” completely overwhelmed everything else.

Perhaps because of the slowness that enveloped the stage like its blue-gray fog, some reviewers have made glib comparisons to Noh. But that Japanese dance-theater idiom is always intently purposeful dramatically and its stage properties always spare and skeletal -- just the opposite of Koike’s extravaganza.

He studied sociology in his youth and the mime sections of the piece cataloged the emotional oddities that can shatter locked-down conformity in small-towns: the oversexed housewife coming on too strong, the woman mourning her broken bicycle, the man obsessed with a puppet, the couple numbly dancing together -- and not noticing or caring when dancing alone.

Benches and chairs formed a kind of classroom at one point (with portable florescent tubes at each desk), leading to a depiction of schoolyard rebellion. Eventually pipes pierced the mast to allow dancers to climb onto it and hang from it. Indeed, “Ship in a View” had every gimmick that money could buy, but only when composer Masahiro Sugaya provided rhythmic chugging passages suggesting machine-engine noise did the dancing achieve any cohesive power or sense of direction.

Much of the time, however, Mariko Ogawa and other company members uttered plaintive, songlike outcries that reinforced the sputtering, stop-and-go flatness of the piece -- the sense that it was heading nowhere or, worse, would adopt the Western modern-dance cliche of closing with a replay of its opening.

Koike used his expensive toys to get a few steps beyond that dead end, but as a creative artist he resembled a Broadway musical-theater director who sets up structures and parameters for a choreographer to flesh out later on. Alas, that much-needed choreographer never showed up for this project.

As a result, everything about “Ship in a View” looked gorgeous except the movement -- and that movement remained a blue-gray bore.