November 27, 2002

By Rita Felciano

LAWRENCE PECH HAS worked as ballet master and resident choreographer for the San Francisco Opera for the past four years. A professionally trained musician as well as an experienced dancer-choreographer, he may be ideally suited for the job. However, if his most recent world premiere, Angels: Fallen and Otherwise (Nov. 21, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), for his Lawrence Pech Dance Company, was any indication, the price of working at the War Memorial Opera House has been high. The opportunity may have blunted Pech's musical acuity; it almost certainly has stunted his choreographic development.

In opera, it has been said, the composer is the dramatist; in dance, it is the choreographer. But there was no drama in Angels. Despite its lofty theme – the presence of angels in our lives – the grandly conceived dance-theater work failed to ignite.

The libretto, by Joseph Harris (who in the past has worked with choreographer Val Caniparoli), Bay Area composer Kurt Erickson, and Pech, told the story of stranded travelers who become subjects of the battle between good and evil. But neither Erickson nor Pech put flesh on this well-traveled skeleton, whose stock characters – a newlywed couple (Andrea Flores and Carlos Sierras), a school teacher and amateur archaeologist (Cynthia Drayer), and a trio of circus artists (Marne Kohout, Michael Kruzich, and Yannis Adoniou) – were fought over by Constanze (Tiekka Schofield) and Lucy (Marlowe Bassett).

Erickson composed a generously scaled score for the 40-minute piece, which was performed in the pit – Pech has always championed live music – by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and two choruses, the Baroque Choral Guild and the Ragazzi Boys Chorus; the latter also performed from backstage and the balconies. Unfortunately, the liturgically inspired music was rhythmically innocuous and as bland as it was static, though sometimes effective at recalling 19th-century hymn tunes.

Angels also suffered from a curious mismatch between pit and stage. Staging oratorios – and this sounded like one – has always been problematic. The music's sacred aspirations (the texts are biblical and prayers) and the representational demands of the stage simply don't mesh. Pech doesn't convince us that we want the characters in front of us.

Angels needed stronger theatrical concepts, better realized. The minimal choreography illustrated, but didn't embody, the experience of these modern-day pilgrims. They walked, they gestured, they fell, they froze into tableaux. Even if Pech tried to avoid realism, his dancers needed to bridge the space between the stage and the viewer. They didn't. And putting a character with outspread arms against a mysteriously lit support that sucks the life from him, and to do this in the context of biblical crucifixion, was asking too much in terms of suspension of disbelief.

Fortunately, the program also included Julia Adam's The Medium Is the Message and Caniparoli's confetti piece boink, in which the dancers could do what they couldn't in Angels – dance. Adam's use of a couch as a springboard for action may not be original, but this nicely timed piece (her first) showed her ability to develop motives, shape space, and individualize character. Flores, Drayer, and Andre Reyes performed with great deadpan.

Juan Garcia Esquivel's big band tunes, for example "Malaguena" and "Mucha Muchacha," were created in the '60s by artists with tongues in cheek. Today their sexy innocence sounds both hilarious and oddly endearing. Caniparoli's affectionate love letter to Esquivel was amusing, musical, and flavored with attitude. For "Dance Ballerina" his quartet of male dancers strutted, fluttered, and swished through duets and unisons, led on by a hilariously affected Kruzich, who also just about flew through his quicksilvery solo to "Carioca."