Dance Review : Tina Croll Dancers Turn Traditional

Tina Croll launched her career as a member of New York’s dance avant-garde nearly a quarter of a century ago. On Wednesday evening at the Los Angeles Photography Center, Croll demonstrated that while she looks barely a day older, her choreographic concerns have become traditional.

The Tina Croll Dance Company, three women with long hair pulled back into buns, offered four works at one end of the gallery space.

In “Stonethrower’s Cafe,” billed as a work in progress, the women, baskets of ferns balanced on their heads and held aloft with well-muscled arms, traverse the stage alert to a threat of violence. The music, the steps and the simple long dresses evoke the ancient Middle East.

Even more specifically eastern is “The Struggle of the Magician,” Croll’s long, meditative solo to music by Thomas de Hartmann.

She seems to be groping for, and sometimes finding, a universal dance vocabulary. Dressed in white and decorated with a vest of gold chains, an expression of serious concentration on her face, she offers nearly 15 minutes of private exploration. In the hands of a lesser performer, this would be deadly, but her skill and utter sincerity bring it off.

In “Starthrower’s Cafe,” an ensemble work costumed in pink leotards with awkward skirts, the dancers perform (to hypnotic music by Harmonia) as if controlled by an invisible force. More engaging and accessible is “Short Stories II,” eight brief folksy vignettes to wonderful snippets of traditional American blues and bluegrass music, in which the specificity of period and style grounds the movement.

Veronique Leduc and Sydney Smith complete the ensemble. The music is recorded. The program will be repeated Saturday at 8 p.m.