Dance Reviews : The Interiorscape of Polsky, Dancers

Novelist Marilyn French taught us all about the difference between the ladies’ room and the women’s room. But then came Rose Polsky and Dancers, impervious to the Zeitgeist of political correctness, calling her weekend show at Highways “The Lady in the Black Dress.”

Why? Because the transplanted New Yorker does not take cues from social trends. She’s too absorbed in her primordial memories, too obsessed with inner voices, too focused on the past and legacies--all of which she makes compelling.

Call her an interiorscape, someone who finds a fascination with the hem of her skirt, for instance, and sees some awful truth or prophesy there. Also call her a neo-Expressionist, for every nuance of what she feels makes itself known through meticulously probing gesture and inventive movement.

Madness is very much on the agenda, except for “Courtship Story,” which evokes Woody Allen’s “Radio Days” with its recorded narrative of a first generation (1920s) Jewish Brooklynite talking about kinder, gentler, funnier, more honest, less complicated times and the major event in her life: marriage.

Here Nola Rocco made an affecting heroine. Elsewhere Tzer-Shing Wang and Jeremie Basmajian successfully inherited Polsky solos. But the choreographer is clearly the one to watch.

And in “Black Dress” 1991--the first 15 minutes being a silent dialogue with herself, ranging from sensual to tormented to serene to demonic--she brings on a cast of characters, solving the problem of how to incorporate other dancers without compromising her scenarios or resorting to formalist maneuvers. A psychotherapist figure sits head-to-head with her, while the others cleverly trot out postmodern props: trees, clotheslines, etc.