Foster Presents Lampoons, Truths About Classicism

Whether or not Susan Foster really believes that a classical ballerina resembles a phallus, she makes the gender issues of the standard repertory a source of witty, provocative text and motion.

Launching the “Sweat! (New Dance From L.A.)” series at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica on Thursday, this locally based dancer, choreographer and academic wore a ballerina-doll as a codpiece and drew extravagant comic parallels between toe-dancing and tumescence. However, the feminist overkill of “The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe” proved only one component in a dance-theater program exploring Foster’s complex, unresolved love-hate relationship with 19th century classicism.

“Lac des Signes” focused on her frustration with the expressive language of “Swan Lake,” while “She Never Liked That Ending” rebelled at the injustice in the plot resolution of “Giselle.” Her alternative finale lacked the narrative clarity and satiric edge that Donald Byrd brought to the same challenge last season in “Life Situations: Daydreams on Giselle,” but her deeply involved, powerfully physicalized performance amply compensated.

Indeed, in the most memorable parts of the program Foster used a modern dancer’s movement arsenal to evoke her attachment to another world of dance. Chair of the dance department at UC Riverside, she quoted from texts ridiculing ballet from a number of social and economic perspectives. She added her own parody of ballet glamour with an entrance in which she wore a tutu made of dangling pink-satin pointe slippers and carried a red-velvet proscenium arch to frame herself properly.

But her dancing stayed eloquently ambiguous--defiantly postmodern at times, but just as frequently informed by ballet in nearly all its fundamental assumptions. An evening of uproarious, large-scale lampoons and small, rueful truths.