DANCE REVIEW : Troupe Dances to Beat of Ferocity and Frenzy

SAN DIEGO —  We sometimes forget about our bodies underneath our clothes as we work, talk, read and think. Watching dance is a reminder that the body can have expressive power. Watching Mehmet Memo Sander is a flesh-and-blood catharsis.

The Mehmet Memo Sander Company opened Sushi Performance and Visual Art’s “Danse Fraiche” series last week. Friday night’s performance gave added meaning to the word locomotion , for there was a crazy, compulsive desperation to the ferocity of motion in much of the choreography presented by Sander and his five-member troupe.

Sander, formerly of Turkey and now living in Los Angeles, says he is not a dancer, as the term is generally used, but a movement artist. The pieces he creates are physically punishing. As the group tumbled, thudded, bumped, dived and did what they called a “splat,” one could not fail to notice the trickles of blood on elbows and large bruises on arms.

In the first minutes of the performance, electronic sound crescendos rose to a barely bearable volume as Sander and three others leap off one of Sushi’s interior walls to enter the performance space. Their outright insouciance was funny, and as bodies ran, collided, huddled and fell, oof-ing into stacks on the hardwood floor, it looked as if we were in for some bumptious, anarchic roughhousing.

The sound score died off, and the work soon revealed an orderly, geometric structure, authoritatively dispatched--almost militaristically at times, with Sander acting as a kind of drill sergeant calling “Go!” “Break!” and “Blackout!”

Called “Action/Life,” the piece suggested that life is hard, it hurts, it evolves. But this was merely suggestive--the work addressed effort more than emotion. In this approach to dance, metaphor is stripped off, dance is pure movement, and the moves are functional. Dancers touch--clasp arms, catch lunging bodies, lift others or fall on top of one another--to achieve a physical action or create a non-literal image, rather than to suggest something sensual or communal, which is traditional to dance.

Sander’s debt to choreographer Elizabeth Streb is obvious. With wit, she similarly pushes her dancers into fast-paced acrobatic and athletic feats, void of emotional signaling. She even uses microphones on the floors, walls and dancers’ unitards to amplify the sound of hard contact.

Sander is one of several choreographers eschewing postmodern glamour for a nothing-to-lose movement style. Music is irrelevant and, if present, used only as enhancement, like lighting. Nothing is disguised, even mistakes. Bodies strain. They have weight and, when dropped, fall hard. They are not figures of floating loveliness, but solid forms of flesh and hard bones, and they sweat and get out of breath. Sander performed one fast-paced solo in the nude, making the sometimes grueling urgency of his moves more immediate. Sander’s movement machines--his dancers--are women as well as men. He makes no overt sex distinction in the group pieces. What is physically possible can be achieved by either sex. “Off Our Backs,” performed by Lucianne Aquino, Stephanie Butler, Leanne Lacazotte and Selene, all females, included fragments of football practice moves, tumbling sets and athletic bodywork seen in “Action/Life” (danced by two women and Sander and Alan Panovich).

Despite the abstract movement emphasis, which was effective, two works that incorporated real-life referents were actually the most powerful.

In one, a solo, Sander executes a series of unbroken movements to the sound track of a vicious male police officer raping a homosexual. This was not a “quick take” for shock value nor blatant social commentary. As aural witnesses, we were given time to absorb the brutal inhumanity and abuse of power, and its reality.

Sander’s moves were neither those of the rapist nor the victim. Stoic, stone-faced and wearing red sportswear, he hopped in a rhythm of copulation (no pun seemed intended on his part), contorted and rocked on the floor, rotated in a headstand, as if the world were upside-down--all in a steadily pulsed “response,” a bloodletting.

The final work, the near-gleeful “Board Stiff,” involved the use of a large prop, a plywood platform with which four dancers interacted, hoisting it like a ceiling, climbing it like a wall, falling onto it like a floor (and letting it fall on them, to audience gasps), and rolling off it in turns, when it was propped on their backs like a ramp.

Sander discusses this piece in terms of architecture, but a playhouse romp with a derring-do exuberance was more like it. Watching it, we are reminded of our earlier selves--energy-driven kids who took physical risks.