Volatile Family Tension in ‘About Anne’

Did the Nazis do Anne Frank a favor by discovering her family’s Amsterdam hide-out and sending everyone to concentration camps? Of course not, but Laura Gorenstein Miller’s weird new dance drama, “About Anne,” makes the destructive energies and volatile relationships inside the Frank family’s refuge seem nearly as brutal and hopeless as the Holocaust outside.

The unbearable tensions of enforced communal living dominated and unified this 70-minute “diary in dance” in its premiere at USC on Thursday. But on the big Bovard Auditorium stage, Catherine L. White’s set never suggested the hide-out’s spatial confinement. Moreover, the characterizations by eight members of Gorenstein Miller’s locally based Helios Dance Theater too often represented examples of identity theft.

As played by Diana Mehoudar, 13-year-old Anne became a commanding woman of about the same age as the dancers cast as her sister, parents and the Van Daans (mother and son). As a result, no young girl’s perspective colored the narrative, and Anne’s fixation on her hunky young father (Kelly Knox) seemed just as plausible as finding her in a dream scene as a Rita Hayworth or Ginger Rogers clone.

However, beginning with an impassioned, deliberately rough-hewn Knox solo in the prologue, the daring extremes in Gorenstein Miller’s choreography sustained excitement even when the Helios acting style plunged into melodramatic excess or her own dramatic instincts led her astray.

The final violent outburst of group hostility, for instance, may have forfeited all sympathy for the Franks and Van Daans, but it confirmed Gorenstein Miller’s talent for compelling imagery and structural savvy. If “About Anne” proved to be less about Anne than anger, its vision of embattled Jews unable to achieve solidarity in crisis unexpectedly linked her story to events now unfolding in the Middle East. That alone is no small accomplishment.