DANCE REVIEW : Scenery Outclasses Company in ‘Historias’ at LACE

Antique images of poverty, forced labor and torture cover the walls and even the audience’s chairs at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, making a powerful statement about long-term societal oppression--more powerful, in fact, than the performance event staged in that space on Wednesday.

A 90-minute multidisciplinary collage of human rights abuses in Puerto Rico, “Historias” boasts not only this engulfing scenic installation by Pepon Osorio, but environmental film and video sequences by Irene Sosa that bring you closer than you’d choose to storms, pollution and other habitual dangers of Puerto Rican life.

In its best passages, the choreography by Merian Soto proves equally experiential, converting work-related gesture into intense group motifs conveying exertion and exhaustion simultaneously.

The text by Soto, Osorio and Lourdes Torres-Camacho documents patterns of racism, police brutality and mass sterilization with frightening statistics: “One-third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age have been sterilized” (spoken onstage), or “36% of all U.S. children with AIDS are Puerto Ricans” (from the program notes).

Before long, however, “Historias” invites confusion and perhaps even mistrust. Does that nightmarish work dance, for example, protest specific conditions or all manual labor? Is it appropriate or just manipulative to depict a doctor brutally crushing a woman patient into the floor right after a filmed interview with a woman who volunteered for sterilization?

More significantly, where is the church in “Historias”? Why repeatedly indict the government yet utterly ignore an institution with a more pervasive influence on Puerto Rican life?

Put together from a core group of six New Yorkers plus 11 others recruited locally, the “Historias” company works hard to embody a sense of victimization. However only Niles Ford gets beyond bland play-acting to wellsprings of pain and rage that transform him into those alternately frightened, furious and crazed outcasts we recognize from our own streets.

“Historias” needs the physical daring of a Goat Island and the imaginative fusion with the past of a David Rousseve. Ford alone performs at that level, but his achievement, the production design and the disturbing revelations of text and film outweigh all the flaws and evasions.

Co-presented by LACE and the Museum of Contemporary Art, the five-performance engagement continues through Sunday afternoon.