Benjamin Levy's 'Bone lines': To the Marrow of Emotion

Choreographer Benjamin Levy had no firsthand knowledge of Iran, his ancestral homeland. He didn't know what it was like for his parents, Persian Jews, to go into exile during the violent 1970s, eventually settling in California, where Levy was born. But he knew that echoes of their pain, and that of their forebears, had lodged inside him somehow, and it is this ghostly feeling of secondhand sorrow that infuses "Bone lines," which the San Francisco-based LEVYdance performed over the weekend at Dance Place.

It was an ambitious project, but the smart, watchable Levy is no stranger to ambition. The 27-year-old, whose small troupe last performed here two years ago, has been steadily gaining attention in modern dance circles as a stylish craftsman with a fierce heart and the daring to project it in movement. His is not generally a nuanced approach, but in his best works Levy can churn up a storm of emotional power through the precision and extraordinary energy of his dancers. In Saturday's program, this was most apparent in the tense, hard-bitten solo "if this small space" and the desperately animated go-go party of "Nu Nu."

But as much as one wanted to be drawn in by "Bone lines," with its theatrical atmosphere and an evocative commissioned score by composer Keeril Makan, the work felt formless and evasive. Levy had shifted from the strong, hot feelings of the Gen Y social life to an elusive, misty melancholy -- perhaps the atmosphere of his parents' living room, perhaps a reflection of his own isolation from the family history. Rick Lee's impressive overhanging mobile of mirror shards and Colleen Quen's costumes, sexily diaphanous at first, then bright and sporty, suggested a world of distinction -- dangerous, but fashionably so. But Levy's choreographic concept was far less defined. You knew the work was in trouble when the four dancers -- Brooke Gessay, Chris Hojin Lee, Scott Marlowe and Levy -- started acting, looking menacing or aghast as they targeted one another's chests, necks and lips with gaping mouths, as if ready to sink teeth into flesh. Was this the kiss of death, or the sucking hickey of regret? Whatever the dancers were up to began to feel like charades, whose meaning it was up to the audience to guess.

Levy is more at home with the tumult and confusion of broken hearts, or hungry hearts. The title "Nu Nu" sounds a little Greek; possibly it refers to a sorority chapter. Certainly this piece had the flavor of a collegiate courtship dance, as a supremely lithe and extroverted young woman (Gessay, who was simply wonderful here) inspects and experiments with a number of male partners, all of whom are her athletic equals though they defer to her entirely; she commands them with a quiver of her backside. This piece soared on attitude and sass, and appealing retro flair (with songs sung by rapper Fabolous, sampling the 1963 hit "It's My Party"; Peggy Lee, with her existential toast "Is That All There Is?"; and the bubbly Anita Harris). But along with its body-baring downtown look and cheeky, suggestive moves, Levy's work said something fiercely devotional about the power of dancing.

Dance was used here as spirited, purposeful conversation -- those gyrating hips and contracting abs functioned as a way to evaluate a potential partner, just as you might chat someone up at a mixer. This deep belief in the art form is what is most touching and striking about Levy's work. As Lee sang, yawning off a lifetime of disasters in her smokiest cabaret fatalism, "If that's all there is, my friend/Then let's keep dancing." Why not?