Music & Dance Reviews : Judith Ren-Lay in ‘Undercurrent Events’

In “Undercurrent Events,” Judith Ren-Lay uses nine short dance solos to structure an intuitive survey of how women are oppressed and controlled.

Presented Saturday at Highways in Santa Monica, the piece incorporates Ren-Lay’s eloquent singing as well as her rambling, self-consciously literary text. At its core, however, is this former member of Gus Solomons’ modern-dance ensemble interpreting everything from the Black Plague of the 1300s to our contemporary information overload from a personal, feminist perspective.

Sitting in a setting both littered with crumpled newspapers and constructed from them, Ren-Lay reads from The Times as slides by photographer Dona Ann McAdams appear above her, supplying a wider social context to her commentaries.

Slides of discarded bushes eventually connect with a song about the President that’s unlikely to become his re-election jingle. The word abuse echoes on a tape track, a rhythmic accompaniment to Ren-Lay’s exploration of sex.

Those newspapers eventually serve as examples of both mountainous refuse and the “confusing, complex and threatening” amount of data to be confronted in our world.

And the dances are listed as “battlegrounds,” physical events in which Ren-Lay expresses her feelings most directly. Nervous, gutsy and full of pain, they show us a very different woman from the urban griot playing with rhyme schemes and intellectualizations about The Enemy..

More tightly focused, “ . . . Beat . . . “ uses Ren-Lay’s music and drawings to amplify her memories of 1989 emergency open-heart surgery and its aftermath. Danceless, it makes a statement about vulnerability using one small, closely miked voice in a big, dark room.

Along with McAdams’ slides, the lighting design by Carol McDowell for “ . . . Beat . . . “ and by Stephen Petrilli for “Undercurrent Events” helped Ren-Lay’s perceptions achieve maximum theatrical resonance.