Pennington excites despite some sluggish moments

Watching a talented artist test his or her creative limits can be rewarding even when the results turn out to be unsatisfying or just plain dull. Case in point: the overambitious, intermittently exciting program by the Pennington Dance Group at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center on Friday.

John Pennington has long been one of the most brilliant contemporary dancers in Southern California, but at this stage in his development, he simply hasn’t the resources to successfully choreograph a 14-part song cycle in German or an abstract dance-drama in which the cast interacts with sculptural scenic elements.

“The Goodman Dances” featured the Concord Ensemble splendidly singing lieder by Alexander Zemlinsky while nine dancers performed an endless string of solos, wearing and discarding filmy robes designed by Jim Tsou and periodically interacting with the singers.

The development and recapitulation of movement motifs made the various sections seem more than just isolated etudes. But Pennington never established an emotional context for the dancing or costume changes, and only the explosive, contorted choreography for Evan Marsh and Denesa Chan gave this eminently civilized but largely bloodless exercise true heat and depth.

Chan’s intense solo in silence midway through “Skins, Screens and Trees” also helped focus another problematic new Pennington creation -- this one a women’s quintet attempting to depict an evolving environment, its unexpected obstacles as well as its scenic wonders.

The pulsing music by Edgar Rothermich provided a sense of bubbling, dangerous life, and Pennington supplied a startling opening image: what looked like enormous garden slugs expanding to fill the stage and then disgorging the cast.

But the work proved infinitely more persuasive in its pure-dance passages than in the cast’s increasingly clumsy attempts to manipulate or relate to the set units designed by Joseph Shuldiner.

The program also included the award-winning “Reflections on Kreutzberg “ solo from 2005, adapted by Pennington and Emma Lewis Thomas from choreography by the late German modern dance pioneer Harald Kreutzberg.

Changes of costumes, masks and identity made the piece a tour de force for Pennington as an interpretive dancer, but the final unmasked “Orpheus” section was something greater: noble, impassioned, personal, unforgettable. A piano score by Paul Des Marais added to the work’s meditative power.

With music by Arvo Part serving as a kind of pulse marking the passage of hours, years, decades, guest dancer Nancy Colahan feelingly summarized a life in a few moments of sublime liquid swirling patterns punctuated by sky-sweeping reaching gestures in Tonia Shimin’s new solo, “Of Time and the Spirit.” Who needs garden slugs with talent like this?