Drawing Inspiration From Headlines

How do you dance at a time of overwhelming daily violence in the Middle East? How do you make dances about that violence?

In a provocative, uneven program titled “Because the Day Was Sunny,” choreographer Kristen Smiarowski explored strategies for creative engagement Thursday at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.

Smiarowski’s “Elegy” began as a conventional modern dance requiem: Lillian Bitkoff, Marianne Kim and Carol McDowell sculpturally mourning a la the Three Marys.

Soon, however, the kind of sudden, random falls that Smiarowski used all evening long shattered the pictorialism and emphasized the process of accepting calamity and finding a way to get up again and go on.

In their duet “Turf,” Smiarowski and Michele Bloom tried to portray war as a series of confrontations over blocked access to patches of green on the stage.

But the result trivialized its subject and dancers. In her solo “Bus (2000),” however, Smiarowski depicted just one victim in just one terrorist bombing, reliving in her own body and consciousness the moments before and after an incident that killed six people.

Bracing against a chair, climbing on it, sinking in it, she achieved a remarkable meditative identification with dying on a bus. But the film that followed, “Beyond,” by Smiarowski and Dmitry Kmelnitsky, merely expanded the imagery of “Bus” in a formal coda of spinning chairs, swirling clouds and headlines.

Other spoken headlines punctuated “Attempts,” in which Smiarowski and Tom Young performed a postmodern movement cycle, repeated it while describing grim milestones in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and then silently performed it again with those milestones resonating in everyone’s minds at each step.

“The situation compelled us to make a dance,” they told us, and even though they judged themselves to be merely “faking it,” the chilling result did represent, in their words, “a dance of death for Israelis and Arabs.”

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Kristen Smiarowski and Company perform tonight at 8:30, Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. $15. (310) 315-1459.