DANCE REVIEW
Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe.
Her dancers pull contraband candy bars out of trench coats and grasp Oreos and caramels like poisonous temptations in their quaking hands. By trying to make the action covert, Donovan comes up with fresh ideas: one woman sneaks out of the wings flat on her back, propelled by her heels, and manages to snag a candy wrapper with her toes. Then, she races after it like a dog after her tail.
Tim Melbinger has written an unsettled, Satie-esque score for woodwinds and xylophone, but the problem at the center of ''Scarcity'' shares the flaws of most of the choreography in Donovan's current program. Donovan's real scarcity is one of gestural range. Dances like last season's ''Silence'' and ''Unfolding'' are carefully crafted, with each idea being dutifully developed in canon or in juxtaposition to some related shape. ''This Won't Hurt a Bit'' is really made of a single and not particularly interesting movement idea - Donovan spiraling with sculptor Anne Corrsin's overstuffed doll's arm draped around her shoulders like a large and lumpy life preserver. Perhaps because Donovan has struggled with a foot injury, an enormous percentage of the movements she asks her dancers to perform have them lying or rolling on the ground, and they tend to end up lined up exactly where they started.
Still, the current program has its pleasures. I laughed at ''Plunge,'' as the dancers thwacked the floor and each other with rubber plungers to the music of Strauss's ''Blue Danube,'' and enjoyed the over-the-top, pouring violin arpeggios Johannes Ammon and Igor Tkachenko played live for ''Unfolding.''
Perhaps Donovan's most productive direction will be in working with videographers like Gene Preble and filmmakers like Judy Collins. In ''Fragile Connections'' the theme may be the fragile connections among people and among individual adults and their own childhoods, but the most robust, and fruitful connection seemed to be the way Donovan's dancers played against Preble's video feedback loop. In ''Fragile Connections,'' mundane gestures don't look mundane anymore. As the dancers lift their legs, the afterimage on the videoscreen flattens the gesture into a citrus-colored fan.
This story ran on page B17 of the Boston Globe on 04/05/98. © Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.