Dance and Music Reviews : Pacific Ensemble in Generator Eight Series at LATC

Danielle Shapiro has a lot to answer for. As producer of the Generator Eight series, she arranged with the Los Angeles Theatre Center to charge participating companies hefty up-front fees (plus half the box-office receipts) to cover out-of-pocket expenses: terms that outraged many artists in the local dance community.

In performance, the series has proven a decidedly mixed blessing, with Shapiro’s own Pacific Dance Ensemble floundering Friday in three group pieces that relentlessly submerged the individuality of company members in quasi-cosmic atmosphere.

Vacantly executed, Young-Ae Park’s familiar plotless exercise “A Wrinkle in Space (Par Avion)” contrasted out-of-context gestural flotsam (handshakes, finger-pointing, waving) with formal hand motifs, extending this concept to playoffs between dance styles--all performed in a doom-laden manner to recorded music by Lorenzo Buhne and Mona Lia Ventress.

Jennifer Thienes’ fragmentary new abstraction, “Nimbus,” used a weighty, original percussion score by Dwight Dixon to accompany fleet, centrifugal excursions by six dancers. The music (performed live by Timm Boatman) continually clashed with the light, linear movement, and Thienes never developed this relationship--nor did much with those picturesque chain-tableaux and passages when dancers braced themselves against one another. There was lots of motion (some of it beyond the dancers’ abilities), but no impact.

Set to music by Dusan Bogdanovic, Gilberte Meunier’s new creation myth “Crow” relied on histrionic cliches (particularly silent screams) and literal acting out of the song-texts--but also boasted sections in which she fluently integrated gestural grotesquerie with a propulsive, intriguingly slinky dance style.

Remarkably, the piece’s flamboyant design elements--a landscape of crumpled or warped tubular forms (by sculptor Stephen Freedman) and the hooded unitards striated in black (by A. Jeffrey Schoenberg)--never overwhelmed the dancing, for Meunier somehow brought Pacific Dance Ensemble at least partway out of its funk.

Derek Penfield looked particularly sharp and committed but, even so, the standout performance came from singer Nimon Ford-Livene, backed by Bogdanovic (guitar), James Newton (flute), and Denise Briese (bass). Bogdanovic and Newton also demonstrated their artistry in solos and duets elsewhere on the program, while pianist Bryan Pezzone earned the evening’s biggest ovation for superbly playing Dixon’s new neo-Romantic “Toccata.”