Elegant Moments but a Weak Whole in Jin-Wen Yu Program

That the partially filled aquarium that dancer Jin-Wen Yu was gyrating atop cracked midway through his performance of “Water Series” at Los Angeles Theatre Center on Friday did not bode well for the choreographer. Happily, the fish survived in this piece, but the six-part program, “Cintercommunity,” sank in an abyss of limited movement vocabulary, sluggish pacing and manipulative musical choices.

Which isn’t to say that Jin-Wen Yu Dance, based in Wisconsin and steeped in a kind of tai-chi-meets-Isadora-Duncan motif--with Chinese opera dance thrown in for global measure (all choreographed by Yu)--did not provide some elegant moments.

To the contrary: In the playful “Double Feature,” Lori Dillon and the stunning Yun-Chen Liu moved adroitly from mechanical dips and bends to possessing Jell-O-like bodies, fluid in their unisons, delicate hands aflutter. “Spiegel im Spiegel” reunited them in a grief-laced duet set to Arvo Part music.

“Which One Is Pink?” saw Liu and Yu providing an energetic if undistinguished pas de deux to the sounds of Pink Floyd.

In “Passer-By,” the duo was joined by Dillon to create ever-changing relationships between the trio, which was unfortunately marred by excessive arm-flailings and the inexplicable lifting up of shirts.