DANCE REVIEWS : Chiao-Ping Expressive at Women’s Fest

In her complex and engrossing 40-minute solo, “Entombed Warrior,” Li Chiao-Ping evokes archetypal images of women while also demonstrating the specific resources of a highly articulate dancing body.

Introduced Friday on an otherwise virtually danceless three-part Women’s Festival dance program at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, “Entombed Warrior” takes Chiao-Ping through exploratory cycles of motion: some based on balance, others on undulation, still others on gymnastics.

Many of the physical events and processes of the solo start small but expand to engulf the dancer, with Chiao-Ping’s richly expressive use of shoulders and upper torso creating a sense of living sculpture.

Suggestions of languorous women, delicate women, sensual women, women of power appear and vanish, as if we’re watching a kind of time-lapse cavalcade--an impression reinforced by the presence of a huge pendulum in the center of the stage and, later, the use of a metronome.

Midway through, Chiao-Ping unrolls a large muslin scroll, dances on it and then sinks onto a mound of colored powder placed at its midpoint. The powder stains her bare chest and becomes a kind of heraldic emblem she wears: the artist-as-warrior, perhaps, or the artist as just one more figure on the long scroll of time that she depicts.

Either way, her rigor and expertise set a standard unmatched by two theater pieces on the program: Tanya Blood Hinkel’s “u” and Deborah Oliver’s “Split.” Hinkel understands what ritual looks like but can’t vary her ceremonial patterns without ruinous lapses in stagecraft: scene shifts that last far longer than the episodes they punctuate, for example.

Worse, the level of energy and concentration by her five-member company remains much too low to involve the viewer in either the rites she devises or the subjects she attempts to physicalize (13th-Century Afghanistani poems and alchemical philosophy).

Created with Peter Schroff, Oliver’s work-in-progress features an oppressive male, an oppressed woman and a large armchair--elements developed into a potent dance drama by choreographer Ray Tadio in “Lover Man” for the New York-based Footprints company. Oliver, however, reduces movement expression to simplistic slow-motion gesture, concentrating instead on text (excerpts from Anne Sexton) and play-acting.

The result doesn’t even qualify as movement- based and it belongs to the 1970s in both its style and prevalent female passivity. “My body is useless,” Oliver cries at one point, and the statement could represent her credo as an artist as much as a lament by her latest victim-in-lingerie.