Capital Fringe Festival Dance Offerings Not Finding a Welcoming Groove

Dividing up the Capital Fringe Festival's offerings among theater, dance and everything else is not a worthwhile task. It's simpler to distinguish between, say, shows about sex and shows not about sex.

There is dance to be seen, but you have to read the fine print of the 60-plus-page program to find it. Opening-weekend performances included the return of a 2008 favorite, some literary movement theater and a rush of South Asian dance.

The women of Word Dance Theater are back reprising "Revolutionary! Isadora Duncan." Like the "mother" of modern dance herself, this biographical revue tends toward flighty melodrama. Sarah Pleydell stars as Duncan, recapping the dancer's life in a series of monologues, delivered while she lounges on a settee, stage left. Cynthia Word, Valerie Durham and Ingrid Zimmer perform excerpts from 11 of Duncan's whimsical dances. They come off as childlike and free, game but a bit amateurish.

The aesthetic of trying is a recurring theme at the Fringe. Old Lore Theater Company won last year's Best Dance Show award with "The Fiddler's Ghost." This year, the company spun Edgar Allan Poe's six-stanza ballad "Annabel Lee" into a 30-minute work combining dance, good live music, cheesy recorded music, spoken word and primal screams. Several Old Lore performers are veterans of Synetic Theater Company, and thus are schooled in Eastern European movement theater. The strength of the show is its abstract partnering: There's an enthralling waltz where the performers morph from frolicking children to pairs of young lovers. At other points, the cast takes on more complicated choreography than they can handle, and the small stage can safely hold.

Configurations were also a problem over at the Cirque du'SAPAN, a multidisciplinary performance put on by the South Asian Performing Arts Network and Institute. As any ringmaster can tell you, awkward transitions are a killjoy. This circus was beset by pauses, technical snafus and audible walkie-talkies. ("We're ready backstage.") One tabla and violin duet was quite good, but the dancers were several rehearsals away from even Fringe prime time.

There's a plethora of South Asian dance at the festival. One hopes Sunday's performance marked the only time that one Bhangra dancer will drag another offstage.

Oddly, one of the weekend's best dance performance came from an actress who barely moved. In "Cover Me With Humanness," Gwen Grastorf portrays Degas' iconic statue the "Little Dancer." For 60 minutes, Grastorf stands with her back arched and her feet perfectly splayed, chin pertly tilted up. The play is about, among other things, what compels people to watch dance. It's a good question. So far, the Fringe Festival isn't offering a clear answer.