Music and Dance Reviews : Works by Schaffer, Stern at Westside Academy

In a tongue-in-cheek prologue to an evening of their work at Westside Academy of Dance, Karl Schaffer and Erik Stern explained which parts of the program could be considered art (and thus interpreted) and which could not.

Thereafter, on Saturday these two California-based choreographers presented ironic, text-based pieces that explored how people conceptualize experience.

Sometimes movement merely decorated a text, as in Stern’s “Tiresome Explanations,” a hilarious compendium of the excuses found on insurance-claim forms. But words and motion matched perfectly in two inspired satires about over-analyzing dance.

Schaffer’s post-Cunningham-style solo “Fad” verbally defined and mocked itself as it went along. Stern’s duet, “Ethnic Dance,” cast him as an ineffectual academic explaining break-dance (in French) while Chris Jones provided demonstrations that needed no commentary.

Because “thinking too precisely on the event” is their favorite theme, it was inevitable that Stern and Schaffer choreograph “Hamlet.” However, their “To Be or Not to Be” duet proved strangely prim and dutiful, except for their inspired shuffle-off-to-Buffalo on the line about shuffling off this mortal coil.

Perhaps Stern and Schaffer are prisoners of logic. Certainly their work can seem doggedly, predictably schematic, whether it’s the rhythmic litany of corporation names in “Mating Call” (Stern’s duet with singer Joyce Fleming) or their new, collaborative piece for Pacific Dance Ensemble, “The Curse of E.S.P.”

Alas, a suite about dancers who dance while they think about something else merely encourages the audience to think about something else too.