Terrible state
John Jasperse's California is out of order.

By Joyce Nishioka

IN CALIFORNIA EVERYTHING is broken, from the leaf blowers that lose power to the people who never quite connect. Performed last weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the experimental dance piece combined simple movements and repetition to a numbing effect. If misery is what choreographer John Jasperse intended to convey, he succeeded.

Jasperse grew up in Maryland and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, but his artistic sense is more European than American. (Musicality? What's that?) In the late '80s he danced in Brussels with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, a pioneer of European dance theater whose works reflect a nihilist philosophy. Not surprisingly, European audiences were the first to applaud Jasperse's works; in the mid '90s he won several prestigious choreography awards, including three from the Rencontres Internationales Chorégraphiques and the Mouson Award.

Jasperse's newest piece – and Bay Area debut – relays a sense of existential doom by using the state of California as a metaphor for broken dreams. Here, there are no Hollywood endings, and optimism quickly fades to cynicism. From the onset things went wrong: three women entered the stage, boldly ornamented with a hanging metallic-looking canopy designed by architect Ammar Eloueini, but the houselights remained on, as if due to some mechanical glitch.

Clad in blue mechanic uniforms, the dancers – Steven Fetherhuff, Eleanor Hullihan, Rachel Poirier, Katy Pyle, and Jasperse – seemed ready to repair the defects around them. They used leaf blowers to unfurl the canopy and blow it upstage, and later pulled on its strings until the mammoth structure partially collapsed. As California progressed, though, it became obvious the dancers were as broken as the material things they were supposed to fix. Set to Jonathan Bepler's dissonant score, which at various times screeched and halted, the choreography plodded along at a frustratingly slow pace. The dancers rolled on the ground in unison like a group of angst-filled insomniacs and dragged their arms to the floor as if physically unable to get up. During the more intricately choreographed trios and duets, bodies huddled en masse one moment and violently whipped through space the next. Apparently happiness and contentment are just temporary states of being.

When the dancers shed their uniforms to reveal ragged underwear, they appeared more vulnerable, but emotions remained absent. In the end, the music emitted several jarring, clash-and-clang noises between the sounds of a sputtering motor. Leaf blowers were placed atop two supine bodies, while next to them a dancer pulled at the never-ending cord of another blower.

California ultimately blurred the line between life and art. Viewers were left feeling miserable after the hour-long piece. It just wasn't working.