Two new dances and a revival made up Boston Conservatory Dance Theater’s fall concert last weekend. All three had 20th-century scores that might be called interpretations of vernacular or popular music, and each was set in a different idiom of dance modernism. Laszlo Berdo’s premiere, Bass Element, featured four men and three women in a formal, modern-ballet style. The piece reminded me of the way George Balanchine could wield a minimum of forces as if he were making a huge ballet spectacle. Berdo’s small ensemble sorted itself in alternating symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns, first the women, then the men. A male soloist (Dam Van Huynh) was set against a contrasting group. There was a pas de deux that turned partnering conventions inside out, a finale with lots of jumping, and a bang-up finish as the men dove to the floor, making a frame for the women, who were posing in profile.

The piece showed off all the dancers’ jumping and turning abilities and the women’s line in arabesque, their pointe-work posing. Kurt Douglas and Michelle Imhof glided smoothly through the duet as if it were an ordinary thing for the man to partner the woman while kneeling, or for them to achieve a climax with her tipped head-first over his back. They all looked very proper; I didn’t feel they really absorbed the slithery jazz, the irregular rhythms, and the ping-pong counterpoint of the four short sections in Edgar Meyer’s interesting score, a work in progress for bass and piano that we heard on tape.

The music for Seán Curran’s premiere, by Leos Janácek, was live but mattered less, I thought. The Only Way Out Is Through was accompanist by violinist Ala Benderschi and pianist Vladimir Martinka in the Violin Sonata and Martinka in On an Overgrown Path No. 8 ( " Unutterable Anguish! " ). Perhaps prompted by the Eastern European flavor of the music, Curran choreographed some strong, peasantlike movement for the large group of dancers. But for me, the dance was even more influenced by the black-and-white Mark Randall photograph projected on the backdrop, one of those worshipful, artful studies of huge machinery parts that might have been made in the early Soviet era.

The dancers were massed in front of this icon as the dance began, and they came forward two at a time, sturdy and idealistic, in Emiko Tokunaga’s black proletarian costumes. After that, the ensemble rearranged itself in many small units — quartets, pairs, and even a through-the-arches procession of couples that occurred twice — but there were no solos in this collectivist world. I thought about how the Soviets revamped classical ballet, keeping the virtuosity and the spectacle but downplaying individual achievement. Personal expression became group gesture. Stories disappeared. Formalism was everything.

Curran hinted at all this, and at the gender typing of the period. The men did comradely, muscular gestures and hearty jumps. The women were more contained, sometimes skipping in jolly circles as if they’d been studying at the Isadora Duncan school in Moscow. In the finale, all 16 men and women lined up and faced the audience, together for the first time since the start. They flung out their diagonal gestures and sideward lunges, they windmilled their arms at the end, in a great celebration of work-energy.

Curran’s choreography sometimes seemed overloaded with ideas, and just when I’d think the dance was headed in one direction, it would veer into another. I may have made the Soviet connection more important than it was meant to be. Perhaps those references were only tools in Curran’s postmodern arsenal and the dance wasn’t intended to " mean " anything at all.

Murray Louis’s movement is all shapes and motor propulsion, a fine-tuned instrument designed for audience appeal. His 1984 Four Brubeck Pieces brought out the dancers’ personalities as the two other works didn’t. In their op-art black and gray body suits, the four women and four men replicated the Dave Brubeck/Paul Desmond bebop note for note. First there was a raft of hesitating jumps on rhythms of seven ( " Three To Get Ready " ). Then, after some dreamy preliminaries to " Koto Song, " there was a series of brightly lit solos with the group in tight formations, almost swimming in the background in a blue haze. " Unsquared Dance " gave pairs of dancers a chance to elaborate on the Lindy. Finally, with the Brubeck signature " Take Five, " they did a long string of solo turns of every kind — acrobatics, burlesque, balletic tricks — and brought the audience to a screaming ovation.

Issue Date: November 22 - 29, 2001

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