Dance Reviews : Pilobolus Offers New Work at Doolittle Theatre

Pilobolus’ newest work of dance theater may well be the raunchiest in the company’s 17-year history. Not the nudest or sexiest, but the most deliberately, uncompromisingly gross.

Introduced to local audiences on Wednesday at the Doolittle Theatre, “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” uses a jukebox full of Elvis Presley records to accompany a lampoon of sexual attitudes in the early rock ‘n’ roll era.

“Love ain’t never easy,” warns a narrator imitating Presley’s speech. Pilobolus provides the proof. Here are jocks reduced to quivering blobs by anything resembling a woman’s breast--and prom queens who pad their brassieres and yearn to be carried off by bare-chested, pouty-lipped hulks.

They grope one another, they abuse one another. They are exposed in all their infantile desperation through dances mocking societal patterns of sexual enticement, manipulation, subjugation and harassment. Few of these dances are stylized, though many are wildly exaggerated.

The galvanic, pelvic shimmy by Jude Sante (to “Tutti-Frutti”), for example, is like a lewd sketch scrawled on a wall. You see Sante’s spot-lit bottom (in aqua shorts) shake, rattle and roll, you see the guys watching her turn to goo. Like most of “I’m Left . . .,” it’s vintage, Tex Avery-style cartoon-dancing: all-American, gloriously lowbrow, but performed with superhuman energy and control.

Alas, it’s also either far too long or much too short. The sections don’t develop or intensify any idea, image or process, they simply reiterate the obvious premise from slightly different perspectives.

There are surprises, there are highlights, but there is also the sense that the four directors and ten choreographers on the project haven’t arrived at a definitive structure or sequence--that they are still exploring possibilities.

Nevertheless, “I’m Left . . .” has an authenticity missing in the more cohesive “Return to Maria La Baja.” This 1984 work by Robby Barnett and Alison Chase (in collaboration with Robert Faust and Lisa Giobbi) makes a similar statement about destructive sexism but has no humor whatsoever and bludgeons the audience with all the pretentious claptrap of European neoexpressionism.

Nevertheless, this curiously imitative and ploddingly linear dance drama (to music by Paul Sullivan) features the superbly pliant, expressive Carol Parker and that’s enough to make it watchable. Jim Blanc also has his moments as a bloated, threatening old woman.

The familiar “Day Two” (1980) ends the program with its exhilarating animal motion and animal energy, its inventive body sculptures and flawless performances.