MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : ‘AT THE FRINGE: 1986’

From two of the most purposeful 1985 dance series--Marion Scott’s “Visions” and Deborah Oliver’s L.A. Fringe Festival--comes “Dance and Performance at the Fringe: 1986,” a three-program, two-weekend event at the former Challenge Creamery Building near Little Tokyo.

The four-part Saturday program again featured the feminist perspective and the emphasis on dark views of sexuality that Scott and Oliver offered a year ago. But this time, dance counted for next to nothing. No piece risked sustained choreographic statements, developed fresh movement ideas or even investigated a pre-existing vocabulary with any pertinence.

Thus pantomime signals (often crude), neo-Expressionist texts (usually spoken in an oh-so-knowing tone) or special effects (mostly clumsy) invariably explicated thematic content. And frequently the themes themselves had been explored in far more thoughtful and distinctive dance or performance art works locally in the past.

Both Oliver’s “Girl Stories, Part V” and Rikky George’s “Doing the Agreeable” satirized obvious media cliches of unliberated womanhood: socialites in cocktail dresses, models in lingerie, a black maid, a terminally passive Queen Elizabeth II. Neither provided much insight but, beyond all the desultory aerobics, Oliver’s layered action plan did inventively exploit the extreme depth of the Fringe stage space.

George’s usual stock in trade is ‘50s camp and homosexual violence, but this time he chose a role (the intruder in Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom) that might have directly dealt with the hostility toward women always peripherally evident in his work. No such luck. After a promising passage of nervous spasms occasioned by his proximity to HRH, he copped out with an escape to eccentric fantasy.

Although Peter Schroff’s “The Garden” assigned each of its three performers a reiterated movement-task (swinging a golf club, for instance), the piece focused on lighting: how the performers looked when lit by a neon halo, a hidden lamp at chair level, a moving slide projector, etc. This example of sculpture-based performance art grew awfully labored in execution but, compared with the collages of borrowed poses in the Oliver and George works, Schroff’s images were at least original.

Genuine jazz/gymnastic dancing did turn up in D’Warf’s “Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight” but it never proved integral to this feverish, disorganized study of sexual subjugation and assault.

More distinctive than the dance sequences (decently executed by Janet Carroll, Anita Pace-Warfield and the choreographer) were the grotesque mime episodes: rats devouring a woman (a concept from D’Warf’s “Snax”), or D’Warf strangling Joan Callopy as she sang the Habanera from “Carmen.”

“ Si je t’aime, prends garde a toi “ indeed.