DANCE REVIEWS : ‘FLOATING STONE’ IN LITTLE TOKYO

Meandering verse about becoming one with nature, solemn modern-dance choreography about blissing out through pseudo-Sufic spinning, endless slide projections of misty mountaintops: Hae Kyung Lee’s “Floating Stone” seemed a throwback to the feel-the-vibes indulgences of ‘60s California mysticism, Saturday at the Japan America Theatre. With one exception.

An ‘80s creation both technologically and structurally, Carl Stone’s remarkable electro/acoustic score mixed organ tones, percussive rhythms, vocal washes, splashy contrasts, incremental permutations and other felicities to create a sense of atmosphere, momentum, variety and excitement that the evening otherwise lacked.

Moreover, Stone’s performance of the music, his sense of deep engagement with his art, pulled the attention of at least one viewer away from the generalized pictorialism of Lee’s choreography and Eric Lawton’s slides.

Lee’s solo and the dancing of James Kelly in two group sequences had mesmerizing skill and concentration. But the absence of any contact between dancers, and the absence of any lower-torso motion in Lee’s vocabulary, kept the level of intensity minimal. This choreography stayed fundamentally disengaged in several ways at once.

In addition, some of Lee’s spatial gambits--usually her most original achievements--proved curiously second-hand. Her extended “Way of Light” sequence, for example, contrasted the sinewy movement of one couple with the slow positional changes of two nearly nude dancers (“live sculpture”) on a platform: a replay of her “Cirrus” on this stage two years ago.