Only Dancers Live Up to ‘Possibilities’

There’s nothing wrong with the dancing in “Possibilities,” a grandiose two-act theater piece being presented by Instincts Live Media Dance Company at the Assistance League Playhouse in Hollywood. Working with artistic director Liz Imperio and five other choreographers, some 15 locally based dancers look comfortable in a number of styles--technically reliable in balletic challenges on Saturday compared to JazzAntiqua’s shaky classicism at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre two weeks ago, for example--but especially hot when performing the specialty of the house: commercial hip-hop and related idioms.

Unfortunately, only the audience trusts these dancers. The choreographers seldom allow those who start a piece to finish it, and instead keep restlessly, pointlessly reshuffling personnel. The technical directors add their own scattershot variety with disorienting lighting changes and special effects. The costumers impose one cheesy, ill-fitting outfit after another on bodies that look their best only in the few scenes that find them in street clothes. Worst of all, a lengthy courtroom drama performed by eight variable actors manages to curdle the excitement that the dancers generate and send the evening spiraling toward disaster.

Written and directed by Rodney Nugent, this drama uses the same plot as a notoriously awful 1957 movie titled “The Story of Mankind,” with a supreme tribunal debating whether human beings should be made extinct because of an ineradicable capacity for violence. Here, however, the execution of a guilty verdict will evidently come at midnight on Dec. 31, making “Possibilities” the ultimate millennium/Y2K disaster fantasy.

For a very short while, it’s fun to hear our species’ crimes and possible fates argued by a law-and-order black conservative prosecutor (Wolfgang Bodison) versus a desperate, ditsy white liberal defense attorney (Nadine Bernard). But all too quickly the talk grows predictable and repetitive, frequently clashing with the dances produced as courtroom evidence. In Act 2, for instance, actors Lindsey Readman, Enrique Acevedo and Samantha MacLachlan portray witnesses to atrocity, with various dances interrupting or amplifying their testimony. But coming right after MacLachlan’s harrowing description of genital mutilation, Keri Lagrand’s upbeat “Phenomenal Women” quintet seems shockingly cheap--every female-empowerment cliche duly quoted but transparently fake.

Even when the dances work, they often prove conceptually obsolete. Imperio’s credits in choreography for commercials, music videos and touring rock shows don’t help her in a concert dance context defined by generations of innovators. For starters, why interrupt speeches with dance interludes when you can make those speeches into dance accompaniments, using the word-rhythms and text-images to inspire movement? Has Imperio never seen Pina Bausch’s intuitive, nonlinear dance-theater meditations on human weakness--or, closer to home, Loretta Livingston’s use of dancers as something like cultural holograms? It’s strange to ask whether a professional choreographer is dance-literate, but stranger still to see a production so new in steps and music yet so old in creative vision and format.

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* Instincts Live Media Dance Company repeats “Possibilities” on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Assistance League Playhouse, 1367 N. Saint Andrews Place., Hollywood. $16 (students, seniors) to $20. (213) 365-3500.