Bay Area Repertory Dance/East.

June 15-18, 1995 Reviewed by Doris Hering

After his 1968 departure from the Martha Graham Dance Company, David Wood became a professor at Berkeley and earned a reputation as a choreographer in the Bay Area. Now retired, he assembled a group of his dancers for this retrospective, the company's New York debut.

Over the years, Wood has gradually relinquished his Graham roots. His style blends fluidity of movement with formality of structure. And yet the earliest work on the program, The House of Bernarda Alba, first performed in 1970, turned out to be the strongest.

Based upon the hot-blooded Garcia Lorca play about a Spanish widow and her repressed daughters, Wood's concept caught the action at its most urgent. He utilized an abstract set (by Robert Schachtman) consisting of two corral forms, one confining Bernarda and her restless brood, the other encircling the oldest daughter's unwilling suitor, portrayed by Christopher Dolder.

As the women burst from their enclosure and were magnetized by the suitor's presence, Dolder remained oddly passive, despite the touchingly passionate overtures of Ellen Cornfield and Raegan Wood-Sanders.

Wood's other offerings all dated from the 1980s and displaced more craftsmanship than bone marrow conviction. In Duad, Dolder and Anne Westwick seemed to be exploring a relationship that had the pulls and snags of a white water journey eventually overtaken by calm. After Dusk dealt with an urban environment and its lurking fears. The conclusion was particularly effective as the dancers clustered and gazed upward. There was irony in Cara Bradbury Marcus's tape-and-music collage for Wood's American Decades. Using the voices of American heroes such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., plus a few nonheroes such as Oliver North, Tammy Faye Bakker, Richard Nixon, and George Bush, it alternated their words with musical trivia from each period.

Now and then, especially in the solos of Yvette Perry and Ellis Wood-Iseyama, the irony thrust its way to the choreographic surface. More of this contrast would have been we come.

The program's musical accompaniments by Douglas Johnson, John Thow, and Maurice Ohana were well chosen, and the ten-member company displayed consistent unity of style.