Wired Dance Loses Juice. (Reviews: New York).

WIRED DANCE LOSES JUICE TROIKA RANCH 2001 WILLIAMSBURG ART NEXUS BROOKLYN, NEW YORK SEPTEMBER 7, 2001

Back in the late 1980s, many dancers regarded technology less as a new why to sell books and pet food than as a herald of a revolutionary form of theater, one informed by postmodern reconsiderations of perception, reality, and interactivity. Unfortunately, that marriage of art and technology never took off and spawned no memorable dance, save a few minor trinkets like Merce Cunningham's BIPED. Technology's real success was probably in enabling small companies to print their own flyers, publicize Web sites, create their own music, and shoot their own videos.

Yet Troika Ranch, a small pickup company, seems caught in the '80s. An evening of four dances presented in New York felt dated, a time-capsule relic of the Commodore 64 years. The dancers performed to homemade electronic warblings. Around them, on scrims hanging on three sides of the stage, played choppy home videos of trees and highways. Limbs were stiff. Lines were straight. Curves were few. Faces? Determinedly disengaged. Movement, even when joyous, felt determinedly robotic, as if Troika Ranch was the backup dance troupe for the electronic-music group Kraftwerk.

None of this was a problem, conceptually. It's just that the choreography wasn't interesting and the techno-doodling, though fun at times, was mostly gratuitous. Take Reine Rien (one of the two premieres choreographed by Co-Artistic Director Dawn Stoppiello in collaboration with the performers). Four dancers in tight, deconstructed dresses (Danielle Goldman, Lisa Herlinger Thompson, Michou Szabo, and Sandra Tillett) stood statuesque, outstretched their arms and gazed over their shoulders into the distance--zombies in a Satyricon of their own imagining. The dancers paired off, holding hands, but their energy remained introverted. Scarcely a memorable motif emerged.

Meanwhile, scratchy, distant sounds of wind and a sad aria emerged, and videos of trees and a lone dancer in a grassy field played on the scrims around them. Music and video designer Mark Coniglio attached to the dancers something he named MidiDancer: a system of tiny wireless patches concealed beneath their clothing that measured joint movement and supposedly controlled the playback of the video and sound. You might hear momentary hiccups of bees buzzing or rain falling, and the video would shift or swirl suddenly; yet it was a complete mystery as to how the dancers' movements affected all this--as was what any of it added to the performance.

Or take Suite Devo, the evening's other premiere, performed by Stoppiello and the four dancers of Reine Rien. They begin in Devo outfits and end up in their underwear, but there wasn't much depth or texture to what they were doing. It was basically a lot of exuberant rocking to Devo tunes like "Beautiful World," with some dancerly twirls. We were given 3-D glasses to wear, and the whole thing felt as if it were meant merely as some goofy late-summer fun, but how rapt have you ever been watching someone else dance to cheesy '80s music? People might want to jump up and join them, but surely not pay $12 to sit in a chair just to watch.