Despite the lofty ambition and impressive talents of choreographer Crystal Pite, her 2006 work "Lost Action" was curiously unsatisfying when her dance company, Kidd Pivot, performed it Saturday night at Byham Theater to open the Pittsburgh Dance Council season.
"Lost Action" can be taken as variations and different perspectives on loss, starting in a military context. In the opening scene, four male dancers, who keep returning to formation, are engaged in combative actions. When one falls, apparently dead, his comrades come to his aid. This scene is repeated many times, once facing the back of the stage.
Pite is blessed with a marvelously fluid inventiveness, no less impressively in group movement than solos for the dancers. Her own solo after the opening scene was harrowing in its frustration, pain and, finally, defeat when she moved with her head bowed on the stage floor.
The musical score by Owen Belton was off putting, and was mainly a soundscape of fragmented speech and sounds until the elegiac last section. At first, the speech fragments sounded like an audio strobe, with shorts burst of sound alternating with silence -- as though a wire were loose. Later, full sentences and conversation could be heard in English and French.
Although "Lost Action" shows an astute mind for internal form, the overall proportion felt too long at 70-minutes duration.
