DANCE REVIEW : MORE DANCE/PERFORMANCE AT FRINGE

Whether the ongoing series “Dance and Performance at the Fringe: 1986” reflects a genuine creative paralysis among locally based choreographers or merely a biased sampling of participants, the Sunday program at the old Challenge Creamery Building downtown again subordinated possibilities for experimenting with movement to intermedia navel-gazing.

Neither of the pieces with significant dance content tried anything new, though each revealed mastery of craft. Sandra Christensen’s punchy “Divertissement” used a pop dance vocabulary to make a statement about proud, aggressive women and Youngae Park’s meditative “Myth for Six” recycled supple modern-dance undulations and extensions in shifting spatial arrangements and to contrasting accompaniments (everything from soothing canned music to harsh machinery noise).

Christensen’s tableau “A Dream of Blue Women” linked spare mime by two elegant women in the foreground and one sprawled near the backdrop--more an advertising layout than anything else. Lisa Gershten’s music-based performance piece “In Your Coat Pocket” juxtaposed post-modern coloratura with spoken and mimed non sequiturs about the lilies of the field and the carrots of the garden.

Finally, Alan Pulner’s “That’s Life” delivered a compelling opening sequence (Pulner blindfolded and with hands tied, stumbling and struggling to the Sinatra recording that gave the work its title) and a moving finale (Pulner again blindfolded, lit by flashlights, speaking about the deep impact of sensory deprivation and, in the process, leaving himself as emotionally exposed and vulnerable as anyone can be in a roomful of strangers).

Unfortunately, “That’s Life” also included a puerile playacting interlude (Pulner in a paper crown making his way along a paper carpet) and an overlong mock-academic treatise (Pulner lecturing on “King Lear” while teetering on a pile of books) that may have objectified the themes of power, control and seeing-only-when-blind, but destroyed the direct, experiential involvement that made parts of the piece so extraordinary.

The three-program Fringe series repeats Friday through Sunday at 8.