Paula Josa-Jones.

SEPTEMBER 12-13, 1997 REVIEWED BY IRIS M. FANGER

Two special attributes mark Paula Josa-Jones's work after twenty-five years as a performer and dancemaker. As a performer, she is totally in command of both the stage and her body, conveying suck confidence that even questions about what she is doing give way to admiration at the level of skill she employs doing it. As a choreographer, she is a master at the creation of theater-dance: a storyteller, a builder of characters, an evocative commentator on women's presence in contemporary society.

But there's cause for concern about the one-note rag that runs through most of her works: the viewpoint of woman as victim. The aura of madness is omnipresent, as is the notion that emotions cannot be stopped from spilling over to drown any useful life goals. A death wish hangs over the proceedings, never far from the antic action.

The fall program at the Boston Conservatory consisted of four works: the premiere of Light and Bone, a duet amplified by projected slides and film for Josa-Jones and longtime company member Tonya Lockyer; the Boston premieres of a shortened version of The Yellow Wallpaper, based on the novella of the same name by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Tongue, which featured recitations of poetry by William Shakespeare and John Donne; and Ofrenda ("Offering") a stunning solo danced by the choreographer. Josa-Jones is astute enough to have chosen Blu as her lighting designer for all the works.

The Yellow Wallpaper, for three women locked away from the world, and Tongue, performed by an ensemble of five women and one man, share the theme of madness, the latter dressed in an eighteenth-century period costume designed by Elena Ivanova.

Josa-Jones's visits to Mexico and her discovery of the mummies of Guanajuato in central Mexico have been distilled into Light and Bone, developed in collaboration with Lockyer. The two women dance to and are intertwined with poetry by Carol Dine, photographs by Andrew Xenios, and a collage-type score by Deirdre Broderick.

The opening image portrays the duality in Josa-Jones's thinking about gender. She and Lockyer--bare-breasted and barefoot--are dressed in men's tuxedos. When they move away from the chairs where they have been seated, they walk puppetlike, as if controlled by an outside force. Images of church icons and mummies are projected behind them and on their bodies. While the choreography tends to get lost beneath the often bewildering melange, there is a memorable piece of movement in a beautifully articulated bare-backed segment by Lockyer. Some serious editing of the twenty-five-minute work might reveal an impressive addition to Josa-Jones's repertory.

In Ofrenda, which opened the evening, the choreographer gives a lesson in her movement alphabet. Starting simply with a flow from the torso through her limbs, she gradually layers in a pulsing beat, then a hip-hop animating the broken-looking arms and legs. Josa-Jones is gorgeously centered, so that the various movement styles seem to enhance each other, until she ends with a St. Vitus' dance image of trembling. She might be a bird of brilliant plumage, or an escapee from a harem in this is most a abstract of her pieces.