DANCE REVIEW : Phone Obsession Subject of Dance Theatre’s ‘Cattle Calls’

Best known for site-specific social satire, Collage Dance Theatre brought an inventive, unwieldy new piece titled “Cattle Calls” to the Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica on Thursday. The subject: our strange behavior on the telephone.

Choreographer Heidi Duckler bypassed those bizarre parallel tracks of telephone advertising--futuristic innovation and bourgeois nostalgia--to focus on how the telephone releases the caller’s most private, asocial urges. Whether ensnared in multiple phone lines, dueling with cordless receivers or slithering over an overturned phone booth as if it were a reclining lover, her dancers made a potent case for phone obsession as the official American dementia.

Unfortunately, Duckler’s attempt to combine phone fetishism with Wild West lore proved far less pertinent and the subplot of love-gone-wrong seemed equally arbitrary--a detour in a piece increasingly unsure of its direction. Too many statements of the same ideas, too many passages clumsily combining (and overloading) dance with raw chunks of gestural data or slapstick comedy also suggested that “Cattle Calls” was introduced far too soon.

Sharing the program: two text-based pieces with a sharp contemporary edge. Nan Friedman’s solo “Shift” defined a woman’s troubled state of consciousness through naturalistic gesture, with hands framing (or shading) the eyes as a recurrent image. Friedman then expanded these motifs into fluid dance phrases conveying the character’s yearning and feelings of failure--of her life going out of control (“I can’t control the shopping cart,” her text began).

Control also proved a key theme in Katherine Hopper’s “Atomic Bombshell,” an Expressionistic theater piece crammed with sketchy movement vignettes shackled to texts by William S. Burroughs and Frank O’Hara.

Except for the final, ballet-style adagio-in-underwear, dancing here never expressed anything on its own but served merely to underline--or keep you listening to--the bitter recorded statements about war-making and other disastrous human impulses. Essentially, then, Burroughs and O’Hara were the creators of the piece, Hopper just the accompanist.

Apart from its choreographic problems and achievements, the evening offered some of the finest dancing recently shown by local companies, with Friedman, Hopper, Eric Rochin (as the “Bombshell” cavalier) and Robert Allen (as a principal “Cattle” casualty) especially expert. Performances continue through Sunday.