Movement If Not Meaning, Well Defined. (Reviews: New York).

Movement if Not Meaning, Well Defined Lar Lubovitch Dance Company City Center New York, New York October 17-20, 2001

The momentum of bodies swooping and curving through space, crystallizing for an instant in poses of sculptural grace, and then dissolving and reassembling with renewed impetus, distinguishes Lar Lubovitch's choreographic style. These luscious sequenced phrases, performed by stunning dancers, engage the viewer with their kinetic power. But when Lubovitch fails to develop something beyond these phrases, he frustrates viewers who expect something more.

This was most apparent in Men's Stories, subtitled A Concerto in Ruin and set to Scott Marshall's audio-collage of found sounds, dialogue, and show tunes that splintered the lush romanticism of Beethoven concertos. Performed by nine gifted dancers, this work explored the emotional underpinnings of masculine experience. The dancers alternated between intimate and highly charged duets and solos, with sections where the entire cast swarmed across the stage in spatial harmony. Costumed in black with gold-trimmed jackets, the men, in the staggered lines of a ballet class, tossed off brilliant allegro work that took its cue from many a nineteenth-century ballet. They interacted with bombastic gestures, potently exposing facades of bravura. As the dance evolved, the men shed layers of repression along with their jackets, extending physical possibility and, by implication, emotional expression. But at the end, when the men reassembled to greet a puppet dressed as they were, it was unclear to whom they were bowing. Themselves? The choreographer? When the company showed the work in December 2000, at the more intimate Orensanz Center for the Arts, its progression was more coherent. At City Center the work took time, but it didn't go anywhere.

In Lubovitch's new duet, My Funny Valentine, set to Richard Rodgers music, American Ballet Theatre dancers Sandra Brown and Marcelo Gomes shared the stage with pianist Marvin Laird. Though the quirky lifts emerging effortlessly and unexpectedly signified the playful flirtation of this intricate partnership, the dancers appeared as comfortable oozing onto the ground as they did soaring into the air. Their final resting pose with Brown's head balanced comfort ably on Gomes's derriere detailed their familiarity. The dancers' costumes, a gray turtleneck mini-dress for Brown and black shirt and pants for Gomes, complemented the dancers' understated elegance.

Lubovitch's The Wedding is a new production of his 1976 work. Using Igor Stravinsky's Les Noces (originally choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska in 1923), this peasant wedding is set in the Soviet era. The paucity of participants--four friends in addition to the bride, the groom, and their parents--were no match for the power of the score or the vibrant red backdrop of Lenin's portrait above slender stalks of wheat, which, toward the end, turned into flames against a blackened sky. Lubovitch struck the right note when he channeled the architectural postures and geometric forms of folk dance. Nancy Bannon and Jason McDole as Bride and Groom conveyed their conflicting passions with extraordinary vigor, while the others did their best to represent the masses wavering between despondence, exuberance, and inebriation.