Dance and Music Reviews : Tina Gerstler Troupe at Zephyr

Strangely betwixt and between, Tina Gerstler’s dances aimlessly ricochet from expressive specifics (defined through pantomime) to choreographic abstraction (loops of surging, liquid movement).

Sensitive and perceptive, this local artist never seems able to infuse dancing with more than generalized emotional content and she can’t expand dramatic gesture into whole-body statements.

Play-acting usually camouflages the seams--the arbitrary junctures in her work where her dancers suddenly stop gesticulating and start pointing their toes--but one of her newest pieces inventively embraces the dichotomy as a formal structural device.

Introduced Monday at the Zephyr Theater as part of a largely familiar six-part program, “Personal Statements/Exposed” finds Gerstler dancing in her underwear while fashionably dressed Nita Dave speaks a nervous, rambling monologue by poet Amy Gerstler, Tina’s sister. Juxtaposing emotive text and kinetic sub-text, the two women remain on parallel tracks except for a point of intersection, a painful moment of self-scrutiny that fuses them in a single powerful image and sensibility.

In “Better Unsaid” (another premiere), Gerstler returns to her usual form, lurching between modes of performance as she tries to explore the emotional ramifications of a love triangle. Her women (as always) suffer poignantly, thoughtfully, their sisterhood asserting itself even in this competitive context.

However, Gerstler resorts to a formula ending: Half the pieces on the program (including this one) finish with a woman character having enough of a situation and walking out. Moreover, “Better Unsaid” reveals again Gerstler’s inability to create a credible male role--though this time, at least, the man (danced by Leo Tee) simply proves a cipher, a catalyst, rather than the cardboard oppressors she unleashed two years ago in “Arena.”

Besides Gerstler’s contribution in “Exposed,” the program boasts deeply committed dancing by Danielle Shapiro (in “Talking to Myself”) and Kate Warren (in “Arena”). Brad Dutz composed the eclectic sound-score for “Better Unsaid.”