DANCE REVIEW : Livingston Achieves High Hopes

With the works of choreographer Loretta Livingston, the high hopes for the Generator Eight festival of music and dance achieved a resounding measure of realization Friday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Receiving a first performance was “The Arrival,” described as excerpts from an evening-long collaboration-in-progress between Livingston and composer Jeff Rona.

Against Rona’s wailing, New Age sound score (played live by his five-member ensemble), Livingston and her five dancers progress from beautiful but isolated figures, to supportive playmates to a group tightly bonded.

Gleaming in white body suits, the dancers stand in place, explore little disjointed body articulations and begin to expand their range and speed of movement. But for all the activity, they remain unconnected to one another, and eventually this condition finds an outlet in silent screams and mechanized tics and jerks.

Then something remarkable happens--that is, the dancers make it remarkable. They see each other and with a sense of making fresh discoveries, touch and explore ways of contact and support. One person tosses clothes--black pants or tank tops--to the others, and after putting them on, a kind of blindman’s bluff ensues, culminating in a woman hurtling herself in the air to be caught by the group.

In a final section, the dancers jump to imaginary little islands as if crossing ice floes, but making sure to reach out and help one another find footing in a perilously contracting, safe-stage space.

Toward the end, we hear the voices of children (on tape) talking about their worries about the environment and their hope for the future. Although the collaborators must want to make this political point, it imposes crashing literalism upon an evocative and multilayered dance.

If “The Arrival” outlines the evolution of human community, “Underpinnings” (a revision of “Before the Burning,” introduced last year) introduces the sexual and competitive tensions at work within it.

The music remains Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (although the first movement has been dropped and the third and fourth movements rechoreographed). Again, two couples in Elizabethan costume (Lynne DeMarco, Michael Mizerany, David Plettner and Madeline Soglin) promenade but occasionally break out of period decorum to suggest rawer impulses.

When they strip off the finery for the final sections, however, getting down to leotards and kneepads, the dynamics becomes more gymnastic, squared off, competitive. The final movement even suggests marathon contests of the Depression era, as the dancers run in circles, pull their tiring partners through the air, occasionally stumble only to rise and run again.

When they line up at the end they prop each other up whenever there are signs of crumbling. But suddenly they stop, pick up their clothes, hop off the stage and walk up the aisle, through the audience. Has it all been a mere rehearsal? The ending is problematic, unsettling.

There was no such problem with Livingston’s extraordinary post-nuclear holocaust solo, “Don’t Fall, Pomegranate” (introduced last year), which evokes the potential end and source of regenerating human existence.

Rona’s easy-listening “Sirens”--amplified wails (by vocalist Galen R. Brandt), electronic washes of sound and (muffled) taped voice of a child--opened the program.