Music and Dance Reviews : Tandy Beal and Company in CSLA Dance Series

From mere nothings to a dance of metaphoric implication, Tandy Beal and Company triumphed in a seven-part program Tuesday at the State Playhouse at Cal State L.A., second in a new dance series at the university.

In her lightweight solo “Figure of Speech,” the Santa Cruz-based Beal made several not-so-false starts, took audience members into her confidence and challenged them to consider various ways of continuing the work, and ultimately made a dance about making a dance. Modest but engaging.

At the other end of the scale was her “Dust to Dust” (music by Jon Scoville), in which five dancers evoked universal games and struggles, became icons of Eastern religions, metamorphosed into everyday figures; then begin the cycle anew, only to vanish into luminous pillars of sand streaming down from the top of the stage.

Before that stunning ending, Beal managed another theatrical coup: two screens upon which projected slides of the dancers were slowly peeled open, allowing the images to pass through to a scrim at the back of the stage, while, one by one, the living figures moved through seams in the screen onto the stage.

The multiplicity of images, the juxtapositions of fixed art and living humanity suggested the reciprocal processes by which life and art are transformed and informed by one another.

Beal’s four-part solo “Everything Is True but Desire” (substituted, because of technical problems, for “Mysterious Barricades”) traced a woman’s excursions into experience--the rebuffs she encounters, her stylized rituals of defense and her final ambiguous triumphs.

“Little Kings,” a satirical group piece, mocked pretentions and power plays and ended with the six puffed-up egos being deflated like plums dried into prunes.

Four familiar works completed the program: “Creation du Monde,” Beal’s genial company vignette, winding back from a sophisticated ballroom scene to an animal-romp Garden of Eden; “Neither Darkness nor Science,” a playful, eerie shadow duet for Beal and Ellen Sevy, and two excerpts from “The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light”--a men’s gymnastic duet (danced strongly by Erik Stern and Ken Williams) and Beal’s superb weightless, feathery solo.