Dance experiment springs from Elvis Costello’s music experiment

By Joe Brown

Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The main event at College of Southern Nevada’s fall dance concert this weekend was the premiere of “The Juliet Letters,” a new work by Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Kelly Roth. An hourlong suite set to Elvis Costello’s 1993 experiment with chamber music and art song, it anchored an eclectic and ambitious program of original modern dance works at the Nicholas J. Horn Theatre.

In taking on Costello’s “song sequence for string quartet and voice,” Roth seems to have been inspired by contemporary dance icon Twyla Tharp, who has successfully set program-length dances to songs by Bob Dylan, Billy Joel and Frank Sinatra. But Costello’s “Juliet” songs are very wordy and somewhat monotonous by comparison, posing a challenge for the audience, if not for the dancers.

Like Mark Morris, Roth works with a corps of student dancers of all shapes and sizes, and is evidently very attuned to whatever music he’s working with. The choreographer cast himself as a postman who picked up and delivered the love letters, junk mail and suicide notes that inspired the danced vignettes.

It was a treat to see the nine dancers moving to live accompaniment, in this case by the Sol String Quartet, which includes three members of the Las Vegas Philharmonic. The 18 songs (in addition to two instrumentals) were sung by Paul Villaluz, who applied an appealingly smooth timbre, but homogenized the dramatic extremes of the sometimes aggressive multiple characters of Costello’s original interpretation.

A highlight of the program was “Let It Rain,” a brief solo work by guest choreographer Marko Westwood. Working with the unusual pop song “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap, with its slow, ethereal Laurie Anderson-esque electronicized vocal, Westwood moved around and within a circle of light, releasing a shower of red petals, which recalled a memorable image from the film “American Beauty.”

The concert’s real surprise was a Roth dance set to the 1968 Iron Butterfly recording of the acid-rock epic “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” All 17 minutes of it, including the famously plodding drum solo and guitar freakouts. Against a psychedelic light show, 20 dancers suggested a Garden of Eden theme, an energetic mix of animal shapes and ’60s dance styles, with lots of hair-tossing. And as he did in “Juliet Letters,” Roth sent a nondancing narrative character wandering among the dancers, in this case an oblivious safari hunter armed with a butterfly net.

The CSN dancers certainly looked like they were having fun, and it might have been even more fun if Roth had let them all freestyle and just go-go wild.