September 25 2002

By Rita Felciano

IF I WANTED to become a choreographer, I would go study with Randee Paufve. She creates good movement. She layers her material until everything fits together like an elaborate puzzle. She works with superb dancers and draws out distinct personalities. In her dances, solos always balance ensembles (her unisons are particularly effective), and expansive space complements tiny gestures.

Yet despite all the impressive qualities of Enter the Room, Seven, and BloodTongueSeverTatterRend, these ensemble pieces – performed by Paufve Dance, Sept. 20 through 22 at Dance Mission Theatre – also had something mechanical about them. With one push of a button, off they went, like well-oiled machines. Even moments of repose felt like coiled springs. Paufve never lets go. Her dances are almost too clean. So the brain says yes, yet the heart stays mute.

For Seven, Paufve gathered an excellent ensemble of East Bay dancers, including Diane McKallip – still in superb shape – and veteran Frank Shawl. This world premiere was a fast-paced, lickety-split dissection of the seven deadly sins. Artists from Dante to George Balanchine and Hieronymous Bosch to Pina Bausch have grappled with the topic. So Paufve's contribution is in good company.

In what might have been a slight bow to Kurt Jooss's Green Table, an orderly group of black-clad individuals gathered around a big black table, only to depart at the flick of a wrist. Over the next 20 minutes, each of the seven performers profiled a devilishly attractive sin. Shawl (Pride) was carried aloft like a potentate of old; Rebecca Johnson (Gluttony), a compact but lightning-fast dancer, stuffed her face. As Anger, McKallip turned her fingers into clawlike weapons. Initially curled up under the table, Josie Alvite's Sloth would make a slug look like a speed racer. These images – some allegorical, some literal – were smoothly integrated into ever shifting ensemble choreography. The musical selections sounded somewhat eclectic until Victor Spiegel pulled the score together.

Enter the Room, first seen at this year's SummerFest, is a quartet for women in billowing short dresses that opens and closes with the dancers (Paufve, Lisa Bush, Jill Randall, and Alisa Rasera) in opposite upstage corners. The piece purports to show the transformation effected by the dancers' individual exits and reentries. Each dancer deftly expressed a personality trait: Rasera displayed come-hither sultriness; Bush, spitfire energy; Randall, languid yet assertive force; and Paufve, comic instinct (her striding suggested Groucho Marx on speed).

The dark-hued BloodTongueSeverTatterRend, set to some depressing Shostakovich string music, was inspired by a not-included poem, "12 Horrors," by Beth Murray. It lurked like a shadow behind the work's weighted images. While the full-bodied and power-driven dancing again featured individual qualities – those of Bush, Johnson, Randall, Christine Chen, and the remarkable Jane Schnorrenberg – the choreographic action here revolved primarily around Schnorrenberg. She moved as if traumatized by some unspeakable event, finding comfort in the folds of a community. Holding, protecting, with arms around each other, these women wearily trekked across the stage in low arabesques with the world's weight on their shoulders, only to peel off into individual explosions. At one point the dancers looked poised to fall or leap into an abyss, and one wondered why they didn't.