Review: Meet me at 3

Ever since Robert Joffrey mixed dancers on film with dancers onstage for his 1967 rock ballet Astarte, dance has had an abiding interest in mixed media. But since Astarte, which was a superb and considered interplay between live choreography and film, electronics have become more complex. The result has been a bumpy aesthetic union.

The newly Cincinnati-based MamLuft&Co., directed by Jeanne S. Mam-Luft, has taken up the fusion challenge with a 45-minute 2008 Fringe work, Meet me at 3. This multimedia work includes a seductive percussive score by Michael Perdue enhanced with the musicianship of percussionist Jeff M. Luft. The video design is by Vince Linz and Bob Donovan. And the choreography represents collective contributions from the six-member company under the direction of Mam-Luft.

Meet me at 3 has embraced a dance technique called “improvography,” a term conceived by Gregory Hines to describe his formal blend of tap-dancing choreography that he melded with spontaneous moves to accompanying music. The style has been successfully implemented by tap dancer Savion Glover in his recent work. Improvography is widely used and continues to be an evolving dance technique in such companies as the San Diego-based Lower Left Performance Collective.

Mam-Luft’s work reaffirms that improvography is a choreographic tiger to tame in dance creations that want to capture at least some consistent or evolving aesthetic thought as a hook. Anything less is likely to stray toward anarchical movement. Meet me at 3 heavily tilts to the latter. As a child of improvography, it has no narrative theme.

Because the dancers heavily improvise their moves with what looks like the most delicate of directional control from Mam-Luft, the multimedia dance basically is free-form stuff nearly thoughtlessly unleashed. The six dancers begin, seated in the audience. As the piece starts without musical accompaniment, the dancers began rising on their chairs. With highly angled body positions and agitated movements, they made their way to the stage. (This exodus reduced the audience to about 14, including at least three members of the press on Thursday’s opening night at the Contemporary Arts Center.)

Once onstage, the ensuing configurations ranged from soft, willowing solo moves to encounters between pairs of dancers that smacked of passive-aggressive reactions — much pushing and shoving and retreats. Eventually, ensemble passages were utilized. The dancers engaged in body entanglements that make them often look like configurations run amuck from the Pilobolus Dance Theatre at best or fumbled football plays with bodies in a massive heaps at worst.

With the stage lights gone dark, Linz and Donovan’s video was thrown on a large screen, an eclectic montage of soft focus images, wash-outs of people doing this and that, fast-motion and blow ups of images to an extent that they lost visual identification in favor of their basic pixel components that became nifty color abstractions. Unfortunately, there was little relationship between the dancers, the video and a live-cam — that is, when the dancers’ moves could be seen, given the dark patches of the stage during the projections.

The dancers infrequently related to the video. Several seemed to want to crawl up the screen. At other times they just pointed at the projected imagery. In other instances the dancers seemed to regard the video as a new toy. They made shadow plays against the lighted screen. Another wiggles her fingers in front of the live-cam’s lens.

At last, when Perdue and Luft’s percussive music began, their sounds were compelling. Cymbals, drums, chimes, gongs and even sound bites of a rolling surf evoked associations ranging from Far Eastern mystic to more aggressive drum tempos.

But despite the inviting compositions that should inspire complementary or even inventive counter-movements in the improvography, the dancers seemed uninspired. They simply went about their repetitive, aimless moves, giving little quarter to the stimulating visual and aural imagery surrounding and eventually upstaging them.

Meet me at 3 has been promoted as being “highly experimental,” and that is perfectly appropriate for the occasion. After all, that’s what the Fringe Festival is mostly about — the freedom to experiment. But if the MamLuft&Co. is going to employ “mixed media,” let’s mix it, not strive to isolate it.

— Jerry Stein