DANCE REVIEW : Sander Company’s New ‘Pole’ at Highways Space

With gay politics deleted from his creative agenda, Mehmet Sander emerges as the Houdini of dance--not a choreographer in the conventional sense but a kinetic escape artist: Watch him survive The Lethal Board, The Cube of Doom, The Box of Death.

Along with his in-your-face program biography, the confrontational pieces about homosexuality that Sander used to dance encouraged his audience to think of the Board, Cube and Box repertory as metaphors for a life of constant risk.

No longer. At Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica on Thursday (opening night of a four-performance engagement), this Turkish-American artist and his six-member company kept their sex lives and blood tests private, defining themselves wholly through his intricately patterned tests of endurance and skill--physical challenge for its own sake.

There were other differences: lapses, for instance, in the absolute unanimity that Sander always achieved in past performances. Has he come to accept the normal human variables that his army-of-gladiators style used to annihilate? Implausible. It’s more likely that the feats themselves are now so extreme that synchrony can’t be reliable.

In the brand-new “Obtuse Space,” for example, Sander expects his six dancers repeatedly to roll uphill at high speed, all the while preserving a geometry as relentlessly formal as Turkish mosaics.

Well, it doesn’t happen. The piece offers movement spectacle aplenty, with the cast in bright blue unitards constantly hurtling up, down and across a steep, scarlet ramp--always landing full-force on knees and forearms.

But undeviating straight lines? Matched cadences? Perfect order? No. The problems of gravity, traction, torque are solved individually, at different rates, with the more compact bodies definitely at an advantage. The piece always looks meticulously designed, but perfection belongs only to Allah.

The new trio, “Pole,” features the splendor of scarlet unitards against a black floor mat, with a 10-foot aluminum bar hurled vertically between the dancers and then held horizontally by two of them while the third uses it for snazzy trapeze-style stretches. The audience responds as if starved for circus thrills ever since childhood.

Because it exploits the cool expertise of Sander, Lucianne Aquino and Alan Panovich without ever pushing them to the edge of the possible, “Pole” differs from the more familiar (previously reviewed) gauntlet-pieces on the six-part program. Nobody falls on the pole or smashes into it. It doesn’t roll under anyone’s feet or form an obstacle.

Sander’s company still commits more energy to a performance than any Southern California ensemble, but “Pole” represents a professional showcase rather than an experiment in stamina expansion: the most recent surprise from a dance artist with a genius for staying unpredictable.