Strength and silliness in summer dance show

Photo: Matt Haber

Strength and silliness in summer dance show:

In dance, summer has traditionally been a time for choreographic experimentation. As with any experiment, there can be hits and misses - sometimes both in a single night, as was the case at Safehouse's sixth annual Summer Performance Festival, which started Wednesday night at the ODC Theater with Jenni Bregman & Dancers and BodiGram.

Of the three recent works that Bregman showed Wednesday, "Context," a meditation in four sections for nine dancers, made the strongest statement. The 2012 work found Bregman and her eight dancers, clad mostly in shorts with loose-fitting tops, with a chic Gina Levesque in a red suit engineering mysterious yet satisfying encounters in duets and groups to a throbbing original score created by Sunshine Jones.

For the most part, Bregman's choreography bends earthward in some arresting moments. Dancers whisked ramrod arms through the air with eyes cast pensively downward, and Marco Chavez Jr. hurtled compactly yet silkily across the floor. The lighting design went uncredited in the program, so it's hard to know whether the rather intriguing moire effect on a scrim behind Bregman's solo was intentional, but nonetheless, it lent a dizzying constant shift to her restive solo.

Following on the program was "Force," an earnest, yet not terribly revealing solo for Bregman, and "Home," a childlike adventure for six dancers, whose ideas were sketched out more succinctly in the drawings created on sheets of butcher paper than in the actual choreography or execution.

The Summer Performance Festival is curated by Joe Landini, director of the performance space the Garage, where many of the works on the festival's five-day program were forged. The SPF6 is the opportunity for these artists to transfer their efforts to a larger venue. Bregman's troupe is one of eight that perform through Sunday, including Aura Fischbeck Dance, Gretchen Garnett & Dancers, Angela Mazziotta, the Milissa Payne Project, Nine Shards, Vinnicombe/Winkler and BodiGram, who performed in the second slot of the doubleheader on Wednesday.

On re-entering the theater Wednesday night to be confronted with a simulacrum of a speakeasy-cum-dance hall scenario in which we were exhorted to have a drink and dance, I realized at once that we were meant to have "fun." The heart sank. To say that BodiGram's ill-conceived "D.R.U.N.K.S," choreographed by Blair Bodie and Julia Graham, was a frivolous miss would be a kindness.

What followed after 15 minutes of standing around was a performance that was as frustrating as it was sloppy - a juvenile, unfunny parade of lampoons depicting drunken debauchery. To say it devolved would be inaccurate, as this would imply there was some kind of high point involved.

Bodie, Graham, Tara Fagan and Korie Franciscus roll about onstage, do a bit of line dancing and pose fitfully while Shannon Preto dispenses drinks (yes, actual Tequila shots and Tecates) to the audience members, in what must have been a misguided impression that a shot of Tequila would help the silliness go down.

Landini reportedly considered some 120 entrants for the residencies at the Garage that led to slots in the festival. It's hard to believe that he couldn't find a work that would have been more deserving than "D.R.U.N.K.S" of the wider exposure that the Summer Performance Festival affords.